Here’s my take on the “influence map” meme going around, which is probably not going around any more at this point. Let me start off by saying I have no idea why I have so many leering characters here. From top left to bottom right:
1. Winslow Homer – My favorite watercolor painter, ever. Amazing use of light, contrast, and subtlety of color from a fairly limited palette. Also charmingly reserved about his own talent (scrawled at the bottom of The Blue Boat, the painting excerpted here, is “This will do the business.”)
2. Richard Thompson – One of the wittiest cartoonists working today, creator of the wonderful Cul de Sac and Richard’s Poor Almanack. His watercolors are beautiful.
3. Frank King – Though I’m not a Gasoline Alley fan, his Sunday pages are exquisitely designed. Great interlocking shapes and use of silhouette.
4. Eldon Dedini – Another wonderfully painterly cartoonist. His line art is also elegant, curvaceous lines and curvaceous ladies. His art book from Fantagraphics is inexpensive and comes with a documentary DVD.
5. Jack Cole – His watercolors seem effortless and fresh, even as represented in a tiny 72dpi jpg file. He also could work in any cartooning mode or genre, including daily comic strips, gag cartoons, superhero and crime stories, etc. etc. For awhile he specialized in sexy girls.
6. Cliff Sterrett – A master of form and design. I love the way he bends and occasionally fractures reality in the service of making a funny drawing.
7. William Steig – Steig is newly on my radar. Amazingly free drawings and paintings, sometimes with dark undercurrents.
8. Charles Addams – Master of precision macabre. His wash drawings sparkle.
9. Harvey Kurtzman – Another guy I wish I had investigated earlier. Sort of chewy, rubbery linework. Great satirical eye.
10. Joann Sfar – Another protean talent in the same class as Cole, but with a philosophical depth akin to Steig. Draws a great vampire.
11. Howard Chaykin – An irreverent artist/writer with a great eye for design. His Time2 books meld crime, satire, the occult, jazz, science fiction, and his own brand of sexual humor. I wish there were more of them.
12. Charade – One of my favorite movies and soundtracks. Audrey Hepburn gets mixed up with a gaggle of goons who are after money she doesn’t think she has. Cary Grant may or may not be on her side. Henry Mancini did the music.
13. Jacques Tardi – To paraphrase Art Spiegelman, Tardi walks the line between exactingly faithful renderings and abstract graphic design. His cities are rich in detail, contrasting with the caricatured figures that wander through them. His occult alternate history crime parody series The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec is being republished in English by Fantagraphics.