So, first the update on my Island of Terror progress, I have finished the pencilling on all 24 pages of the strip and have begun the inking. It seems sensible to show a frame here and an appropriate frame it is too, all 8 of the Walking Wounded landing on Bundy Island on the first page of the story.

Going back to my roots, the first comics I picked that had any real affect on me were 2000ad and Eagle way back in the 80s. this was pretty much when I realised that I wanted to be a comic artist, I had pretty much wanted to be an artist since I was born but this is when comics became my thing in a big way. Strontium Dog and Rogue Trouper from 2000ad and Dan dare from Eagle had me drawing my own versions of the Future heroes. Cam Kennedy, Carlos Esquerra and Carlos Cruz were my first real influences and Esquerra the first artist I tried to ‘draw like’.

Both Esquerra and Cruz are Spanish artist like many of the illustrators working in 2000ad and commando at the time. it’s probably one of the things that has helped me keep my European sensibilities instead of becoming the poor mans Rob Liefield (I’m not just insulting him for no reason he represents everything I hate about comic art).

With Carlos Esquerra I remember trying to perfect Johnny Alpha’s nose and his distinctive gun shot style as well as the broken black line he used in his black and white days to separate his figurers from the background. Carlos Cruz was probably the first time I actually tried to learn how to draw people and shade all from one artist. Pretty much after that I changed artist every few months and became a hopeless copycat.

It wasn’t really until Simon Bisley that I (foolishly) thought that copying a style might actually get me somewhere, before that it was just a way of learning how to draw. For years I was convinced that there was some trick to it, if I could learn the tricks I could draw a comic. If you find the trick to drawing computer screens then you can draw computer screens and the same applied to cloth cars faces legs trees, everything and then find my own style later. How was I to know you can find all this stuff in the real world to learn from?

Learning from other peoples work gave me some tools to draw with like cross hatching and methods of shading, but also put up massive barriers that still plague my work today. The biggest single flaw I had was flat drawings. When you learn from 2d your work is 2d and relentlessly flat, cripplingly flat. It’s only really now after years based in the real world I’m starting to understand how to look and see the shapes in 3d.

Now here is the list I promised. A list of 50 artist that have influenced my work, many of whom I tried to copy. This isn’t every artist just 50 of them. The really important ones I will go over in more detail in the coming blogs.

Carlos Esquerra
Carlos Cruz
Cam Kennedy
Brian Boland
Kevin Maguire
Bret Blevins
Dave Gibbons
Geoff Senior
Bryan Hitch
Steve Dillon
Glenn Fabry
Simon Bisley
Colin MacNeil
Simon Harrison
Frank Miller
Chris Foss
Kev Walker
Andy Kubert
Jim lee
Todd McFarlane
Chris western
Luis Royo
Alfonso Azpiri
Richard Corben
Kevin Eastman
Klaus Janson
John Higgins
John Bolton
A C Farley
Brendan Mccarthy
Brett Ewins
Mike Mcmahon
Simon Coleby
Arthur Rackham
Ted Mckeever
Simon Davis
Dave Mckean
Frank Quitely
Steve Yeowell
James O'barr
Riot
Simon Fraser
Katsuhiro Otomo
Dean Ormston
Mike Mignola
Sean Phillips
Paul Marshall
Joe Colquhoun
Kevin O’Neill
Arthur Ranson