Now that I’ve done the looking forward post, it’s time for the looking backward post. Rather than recap my own year, which y’all have already heard about in realtime on this blog, I decided to present four cartoonists that really inspired me in 2010, in no particular order: Brandon Graham, James Stokoe, Michael DeForge, and Angie Wang.

Brandon Graham

From Graham’s newest series from Oni, Multiple Warheads

Brandon Graham’s twelve-issue maxiseries King City just wrapped up, and I finally had the time to sit down and slowly peruse them all at the tail end of 2010. I had been reading them as I picked them up at the store but the all-at-once immersion was much better.

What struck me the most about King City was how he structured the story. Although there was an overarching meta-narrative, it read much more like a series of short glimpses into what went on in King City and in the life of the main character, Joe the Cat Master, and his friends than a single long plot. This is mirrored in how Graham drew the pages, with tons of little details and side scenes occurring in parallel to the main action. I think there’s a lot for me to learn here. I have been concentrating over the last several years on tightly structured plots with a clear line of rising action, climax, and falling action. This is partially a reaction to the meandering non-narratives of most art comics and is partially a desire on my part to learn how to build a solid story with clear action, because my early comics made so little sense. Even when I was a performance artist I would try to make my performances little action-oriented stories. Part of the problem with doing this, however, is that I spend so much time on plotting, sketching, and thumbnailing, that by the time I get to actually drawing the comic I’ve already moved on mentally. I have tons of plotted-out comics in my sketchbooks and pocket notebooks that y’all will never see because I got tired of them before I even touched pen to Wacom tablet. So, there’s two solutions: either force myself to sit down and work on these stories or just sit down and start improvising. I don’t know Graham’s process but reading his comics makes me think that I should be less hung up on tight, easy-to-understand plots and wing it more, have more fun and make up my stories as I go.

Also his livejournal is the most entertaining comics blog I’ve encountered. The man obviously knows tons about comics. It seems like he surrounds himself with them and is constantly looking at them. I avoid reading a lot of comics because reading something really striking influences my style too much, so I just read tons of sf/f for the ideas and mental imagery. At least when I mentally visualize scenes from a book it stretches my imagination. Anyway his blog is what I wish mine could be.

James Stokoe

Like Brandon Graham, James Stokoe has been putting a comic out with Image, although Stokoe’s Orc Stain is ongoing and Graham’s has just ended. Stokoe’s drawings are insanely detailed, even more than Graham’s. His comics are the heaviest on the earth, to paraphrase Joe Gross (in Gross’s “Best comics and graphic novels of 2010” article in the Austin-American Statesman, he said Orc Stain “is like one long thrash-metal guitar solo”). Also, what about how he fills in every color with a gradient? I think that’s my favorite part.

If you want a preview of his style, he posted a long preview for a different (maybe never-to-be-finished) series on his blog, called Murderbullets. Click the image to check it out:

A page from Murderbullets

Michael DeForge

A Michael DeForge cover for James Stokoe’s Orc Stain

Michael DeForge makes me want to give up. His drawings are so good, it’s hard for me to even see how he does it. So for this blog post I’m going to try to dissect what it is about his drawings that makes them so good. It might be the insane level of detail that he puts in each drawing. Or it could be his super-slick lines (although I usually prefer cartoonists with shaky lines). Ironically, the comic of his I enjoyed the most had the least detail, the all-screenprint Wet Cough mini printed by Jesjit Gill. Here’s a spread from that:

The front and back covers are abstract comics at their finest. I guess, in the end, I don’t know what it is that makes his drawings so good.

Before we get to the last, but not least, cartoonist, you might want check out this Inkstuds podcast where Graham, DeForge, and Frank Santoro yuk it up with Robin McConnell.

Angie Wang

From her flickr

Angie Wang doesn’t have comics out right now (that I know of) like the rest of these cartoonists but her speculative fashion blog has been blowing my mind and apparently she’s got a book on the way from First Second. I was going to steal an idea from her and do a weekly feature called “Future Fat Fashion Fridays,” where I’d do a weekly drawing of speculative fat fashion for our obese future (and because there aren’t enough fashionable clothes for overweight people), but I’ve got other things I want to focus on so I’m throwing that out to the ether. Anyways, Angie Wang is a really talented cartoonist and I’m looking forward to her book.