People often ask what my artistic influences are, and how it has impacted my work. Well, there’s a number of artists and styles I draw inspration from, and I decided to put this blog post together with some examples to explain how the art style for El Cuervo came to be.

Frank Miller

I’ve been a fan of Frank Miller’s work ever since I was a kid. The story arc with Daredevil/Elektra/Bullseye is the one that sticks out in my mind as the pivotal point in my life where I decided I wanted to write and draw my own comics that were more than just superheroes battling aliens and other superhuman characters. I wanted to do comics that were darker, moodier and had an element of real danger. I was already unimpressed by the garish costumes and do-gooder type stories. It was Miller’s run on Daredevil that opened my eyes to a different type of comic.

I was 6 years old when I read this comic. Imagine flipping through the pages and reading the story from front to back as a wide-eyed child. Then you come across this:

You lose your innocence pretty quickly after that. But I was hooked, and I’ve collected a majority of the works that Frank Miller has done because of it. It’s the pull-no-punches style of story and the noir aesthetic that shaped how I do comics today.

Tarantino Movies

In the mid-90s a director by he name of Quentin Tarantino was making huge strides with his films. Before Pulp Fiction was a huge hit, one of the movies that heavily influenced my style of comics was one that he wrote shortly after Reservoir Dogs. This film, by the name of True Romance was a roller-coaster ride of a story that had a billion cameos (a coke snorting Bronson Pinchot aka Balki Bartokomous!) This movie had a way of delivering a million different stories that were intertwined to form a linear path in the end. That type of storytelling also opened my eyes to different possibilities with comics.

As much as Reservoir Dogs made hitmen cool again in the 90s and made me interested in the genre, it was True Romance that sealed the deal for me to create characters with some depth.

Heavy Metal Magazine

Being exposed to the Frank Miller stories in the early phases of my comic book reading, I naturally evolved to a point where I wanted to see what the rest of the world was doing. At the age of 13, I was introduced to the art and comics of various European artists through a magazine called Heavy Metal. I wrote a blog post about my experience reading this magazine over at my other site, idrawdigital. Click here to check it out.

One thing I will add, some of the artists had a clean and precise line style that I’ve adopted and it has helped form my personal style. I’ve nevr been a huge fan of the Marvel Way of drawing comics, and I felt way more comfortable with the European ligne claire style thatn the traditional Kirby-esque form.

Scott McCloud

Like him or not, Scott McCloud has written three interesting tomes on the art form, process, dynamics and overall culture of comics. His first book Understanding Comics basically said everything that I already understood about the medium and gave me the confidence to use that information in a more efficient manner. The book was great in educating people on the validity of sequential art as a form of communication, expression and storytelling, rather than the typical throwaway entertainment. I’ve read all three of his theoretical writings, and I have to say that there are a lot of interesting ideas and approaches that all comic artists, illustrators and cartoonists should employ in their own work.

I still pull this book out and give it a read every so often. It reminds me of the fundamentals that have escaped my grasp at that particular moment and helps me solve my problems visually. I’ll re-read Making Comics for specific ways on doing that. I wasn’t a fan of Reinventing Comics, but you should definitely read all three if you haven’t already.

Conclusion

There’s still a bunch of other outside influences on my work, and even on El Cuervo itself – but you can get a taste of how my thought process works when I start storywriting and developing concepts for comics. I like the edgier stuff, but that does not mean I don’t appreciate good sequential art. I follow a million different webcomics every week and each time I see a strip or a page by folks like Scott Kurtz, Der-Shing Helmer, or Karl Kerschel, it inspires me to put out the best work I possibly can.

Enjoy El Cuervo, folks – its a pleasure to present it to you each week. And now you know how the mind of Drezz comes up with the ideas from week to week.