Grant Morrison

#4 Grant Morrison



(Note: This is the first comic creator on this list that is solely a writer. Any of the artwork associated with his stories was drawn by a separate entity.)

As mentioned in the previous post, theoretical physics are an interest of mine. Yet, they have no place in comics, right?

The first Grant Morrison penned story I ever read was his run on New X-Men. Like many of my generation, I grew up on the X-Men animated series from the 90’s. Reading Morrison’s take on the X-Men years later was both new and exciting; it was drastically different from anything I had read before from Marvel.

Later, I read his take on the JLA and was impressed. Seven Soldiers of Victory, however, was the first series written by Morrison that really made me a fan. It was in this series that Morrison’s own love for breaking extra dimensional barriers and playing with pop culture tropes was most blatantly evident.



So, why should I hold back with my love of theory if Morrison doesn’t?



The other reason I am so greatly inspired by the work of Grant Morrison is the fact that he can write super-heroes without making them campy, unless he specifically wants to.



As it stands, I cannot currently read any super-hero tripe without convulsing in spiritual disgust. Morrison is one of just a handful of writers who can take super-heroes and make them interesting. His work on “All-Star Superman” was ingenious. Every issue read recaptured the feeling of reading my first comic while not talking down to me. Furthermore, his current work on “Batman and Robin,” though yet completed, feels like a happy mixture of detective noir, circus kitsch, and psychological horror/thriller.



(Special mention should be made to Frank Quitely at this moment. Frank Quitely is a phenomenal artist who has worked on many books with Morrison. Specifically, his more recent collaborations include the aforementioned All-Star Superman and Batman and Robin,)

Lesson Learned: Comics can be as complex as you desire to make them.

Scott McCloud

#5 Scott McCloud



The world is a small place. Patterns pop up everywhere, and as such, people debate whether it is coincidence or predestination. Everyone has their own opinion regarding fate, luck, destiny, and chance. In my eyes, it is a combination of the two.



If that didn’t make sense, let me try to clarify. I am a person of many interests. One of my earliest was space and theoretical physics. The relativity of time has been a concept that has always interested me, but only recently made sense to me. Conversely, the non-existence of coincidence in an infinite universe is a concept that has always made sense to me, but has only recently been of interest.

Where am I going with this?

I never really enjoyed the practical applications of physics when learning it in school. Yes, it was fun to know that given all the proper parameters, one could accurately predict at what speed a car would have to travel in order to intercept a package falling from an airplane, but for as “practical” as these applications claimed to be, they were, in fact, quite the opposite.

Instead, I started investigating the more theoretical aspects of physics. Namely, time, space, and string theory. Whereas these topics would tie knots in the heads of most students, for me it provided answers to many questions, and released much of the knotted confusion that had existed in my head prior to learning of the theories.



Later, in college, I began taking writing courses. In my mind, there was a clear vision of what I wanted to be: a comic creator. So I began taking some writing courses. They proved beneficial, but to my surprise, I was more suitably adept at creative non-fiction writing than prose or poetry. For as much trouble as I had with practicalities in high school, the more practical form of writing became my boon in college.

Despite whatever talent I may have displayed for non-fiction essays in college, it was not pointing me in the direction I wanted to go. The writing course I was taking was not teaching me about the utterly complex art of comics. I thought I could find more suitable lessons in art courses, but alas, there were still no classes directly suited to what I craved. It became clear at this moment that if I was to graduate with a degree in an area I desired to pursue, I would have to create said degree.

I left college with dual degrees. BA’s in English writing and studio art may not seem like the most form fitting combination, neither were they diametrically opposed to one another. In fact, the lessons learned while pursuing both degrees would leave most people capable of tackling many if not all challenges in life. However, if you ask at the right moment, at a time where I am particularly pensive, I may instead insist that I graduated with three degree’s.




Scott McCloud was born in Boston, Mass. The son of a blind physicist, Scott’s life should not have followed a path into comics. Yet it did. Not only did Scott pursue a career in comics, but because of the distinct background he possessed, he was able to usher in an age of comics enlightenment, and birth an age of serious, academic study within the comics medium. When talking at the 2005 TED conference, he posited four principles, which, though applicable to everyone in every field, became specifically important to my own personal endeavors. The principles are as follows:

-Learn from Everyone
-Follow No One
-Look for Patterns
-Work like Hell

McCloud, year’s prior to the TED conference, also wrote some books very important to the medium of comics. His seminal work, Understanding Comics (UC), is in itself a comic about comics. While being meta-textual at its core, it is academic first, avoiding much of the self-indulgence many other books and essays about comics and making comics seemed to linger in. After UC, McCloud wrote Reinventing Comics (RC). RC advanced many of what now are essentials in the digital comic format. Finally, since many good things come in trilogies, McCloud decided to make on of his own, and wrote Making Comics (MC).



UC, RC, and MC became my Master’s course in comics. The three books formed a holy trinity that encapsulated the entirety of my college career and morphed two separate degrees into one singular lesson. Though it would be inaccurate for me to claim McCloud taught me more than the four years I spent at college, I can honestly claim that his three books had a bigger influence on my education than any of the texts ever presented to me in any conventional class.




So why should I have began this brief essay about comics with a diversion in time and physics?

In my years of study, a few obvious, yet ignored facts about comics have become important tenants. Comics are a duality. They possess a bifurcated nature that makes it hard for most people to classify, and thus understand. Comics are both art and literature. They can encompass as broad a spectrum as any book, painting, or sculpture. The one thing that unifies the branches, however, is the mastery of time that is inherent within their creation. Neither books nor traditional art can frame time as successfully as comics can. Even film, the closest existing relative to comics, does not give its audience the control over time that comics present their readers.



Lesson Learned: Learn from everyone, follow no one, look for patterns, and work like hell!

Bryan Lee O'Malley

#6 Bryan Lee O’Malley



Look around you. In any single direction, you can find fodder for a great horror film, dramatic comedy, video game, or biography. In fact, the same applies to most every day in anybody’s life. Yet, the majority of comics literature only focuses a light on the genre of super-heroics. Even if you escape the mainstream, you still have books labeled with such restraining categories as “Fantasy” or “Historical Fiction.”



Through the practice of categorizing books like this, we are harming the reader by dissuading them from potentially great works of literature because the nuances held within are whitewashed by a broad category. Likewise, we are hurting literature and art overall by telling creators their work needs to fit within one heading or another. The blunt classification used by bookstores, be they chain or independent, ultimately lessens the legitimacy of craft in the many works that pass through their doors.

But what does this have to do with Bryan Lee O’Malley?



O’Malley is, in many ways, the underground Moses of independent comics. It is by his example that many creators have been inspired to create the Monster/Romance/Ninja/Western that has been brewing in their heads since childhood. It is by his success that many publishers have deemed such formerly preposterous premises as potential successes. The meta-fictional, genre-bounding narrative of Scott Pilgrim*, broke the chains of bondage keeping many comikers within the shadow of the Big Two.



Personally, before reading any of O’Malley’s work, I had been imprisoned to the old and musty storytelling devices of old. A furrowed brow would represent anger, but how could one represent the buildup to said anger? O’Malley solved this problem by injected the influence of videogames and RPG’s into his work. Dwindling health bars began appearing over characters, alerting readers to oncoming illness, while the accumulation of experience points let the readers know that the character had learned something.

It is through O’Malley and Scott Pilgrim that I gained the confidence to break down any of the walls imprisoning creativity and add whatever tools were at the ready so as to represent the abstract concepts, such as experience and success. Life does not possess boundaries, despite how much we think otherwise, so why should literature?



Lesson Learned: Use whatever tools are necessary to get an idea across and a job done.

*For the Record: O’Malley has a few other non-SP centric, but regardless of their quality, I’m sticking with Scott Pilgrim for this brief jaunt into essay.

Osamu Tezuka

#7 Osamu Tezuka



Between Apollo’s Song, Buddha, and Dororo, Osamu Tezuka has an incredible library of work. However, if you take away those three stories, he still has thousands of pages drawn for numerous other stories as well. Astroboy, for example, though geared towards a younger audience, holds up as well today as it did back then.



Before I continue, I want to take this time to address a subject that pretty much every fan of Tezuka is familiar with. Assuming Tezuka even has any critics, it could be assumed that they have not fully read and interpreted Tezuka’s work correctly. Many people unfamiliar with Tezuka’s work may notice a hint of racism in regards to some characters in his earlier stories. Though these stereotypical caricatures may have been used, it is in my personal opinion, as well as the opinion of numerous others, that Tezuka did not mean any harm by them. The common motif in ALL of Tezuka’s work, which should be noted, is the equality of all man and a dedicated love towards nature.





A great thing about Tezuka was his ablility to create such a myriad of work AND complete medical school. This man had an incredible die-hard work ethic. As if he didn’t deserve enough of the respect he obtained, he made sure you knew he earned it by the shear breadth of his work.



Though Tezuka’s storytelling really carries the entirety of his work, I was influenced greatly by his artistic decisions. Reading a work of Tezuka is like watching a Disney animated featured written and directed by Orson Welles for philosophers. Tezuka can be silly from time to time, but he takes the image of his characters seriously. Regardless of how animated they look, he uses them to convey serious messages.



Lesson Learned: Whimsical art can still convey a serious message.

Jeff Smith

#8 Jeff Smith

The best thing Jeff Smith did was collect Bone into a one-volume brick edition.



Now, this is just personal opinion. There are no numbers to PROVE this. However, if Bone hadn't been released in the brick format, I would have never picked it up. Had I never picked it up, I would not have read it and in turn avoided pursuing a career making comics.



With Bone, there are very few things you can critique Smith for, because for the most part, it is perfect. Smith has proved himself as a master of chiaroscuro. The choices he makes in drawing a night scene in a forest are akin to Edison discovering the light bulb.



The emotion being conveyed in each page is pure and unfiltered by the gritty screen that many comics from the 80's and 90's abused. Instead, Smith gives us Fone Bone, a character reminiscent of Tolkien's Bilbo Baggins, if Mr. Baggins were more dapper. Overall, the characters, though innocent, still make mature decisions when faced with genuine evil. Even Gran'ma Ben doesn't let her dark past force her to be brooding.

The Bone brick is what countless artists and writers wish they had created and kick themselves for being beaten to it.

Lesson Learned: A story doesn't need to be dark and gritty to be mature.

Masashi Kishimoto

#9 Masashi Kishimoto

Kishimoto is author/artist of the globally popular ninja comic, Naruto.



Though lacking a wide breadth of work, Kishimoto makes up for it by going the distance. Naruto has been published weekley in Japan for the better part of a decade. His dedication and drive show up in every weekly installment of the manga, which is evident in its immense popularity.





Admittedly, the cartoon adaptation of Naruto was my first exposure to Kishimoto’s work. Though the earlier episodes were light and childish, I was encouraged to continue watching by friends. Even their encouragement would not have been enough had Kishimoto not devised an ingenious plot point, revealed immediately in the beginning that would shade the entirety of the series. Later, when the episodes caught up with Kishimoto’s original storyline, they entered a period of uninspired and tiresome stories that relied more on showing the characters fighting than developing. It was during these “filler arcs” that I fell out of Naruto fandom. However, a couple of years later debuted the release of a translated Kishimoto art book.





I paged through it while at work. The beauty of Kishimoto’s lines and the juxtaposition of fantastic elements within those few pages were more gorgeous and inspired than anything I had seen in the cartoon. Shortly thereafter, I returned to Naruto, but this time I would only read the comic work. After letting his work fall off my radar for so long, Kishimoto was able to trap me in a story of betrayal, friendship, and dedication, with characters I cared about and lessons I could learn from. Whereas the cartoon had lost some of its original momentum, Kishimoto never let his comic drop any of the passion or energy it began with. Instead, he was able to infuse it with even more power as the story progressed.





Lesson Learned: Character drama trumps total action in the long form narrative any day, but a balance of the two creates a masterwork.

Moebius

A few weeks ago, my friend Dan decided to create a list of his top ten musicians who had influenced him the most. He then challenged me to do the same. Since I am NOT a musician, I took this to mean he wanted me to focus on comic creators.

So I did.

Here is the first of ten posts outlining the ten comic creators to influence me the most, and the lesson I've learned from them.



#10 Moebius

Moebius, aka Jean Henri Gaston Giraud, aka Jean Giraud, aka Gir, is the French comiker best known for writing and illustrating a gritty western comics serial known as Blueberry,






as well as a series of time and space spanning adventures called The Airtight Garage.






Though the work of Moebius didn’t come into my life until after college, it came at a very influential point. The work of Moebius, aside from being gorgeous, is also completed over years. Jean Giraud did not rush himself while making any of his best stories. In fact, some stories feature pages of work that jump back and forth between decades.





Lesson Learned: Great work takes time. You can’t rush genius.