| SPECIFIC
COMIC BOOK CREATORS George Herriman (Krazy Kat):
That was something I could never
understand, the humor of Krazy Kat. But there
were some funny-looking characters. I used to
read it just to see the crazy characters. You
could get a laugh out of it.
Roy Crane (Buz Sawyer):
I think my drawing style is a mixture of
the styles of Gottfredson and Roy Crane and a
whole bunch of these comic book and comic strip
artists. Occasionally there was some part of a
story in which there was a panel that lent itself
to a Roy Crane method of making the backgrounds -
of course his style of drawing was nothing like
the style of drawing the ducks.
Burne Hogarth (Tarzan):
I loved Hogarth's Tarzan. There was a style of
drawing that had quite a bit of Disney in it ...
but his stuff was too anatomical. He didn't have
the soul, the soul that can show through the
anatomy.
Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon):
There was a man who could combine
craftsmanship with emotions and all the gimmicks
that went into a good adventure strip. He was a
master.
I could just sit there and look at the drawings
and be inspired. Of course, I couldn't use those
drawings very much in doing the duck stories
later on, except for the background or the
atmosphere of the places the ducks had to go.
That inspired me to do some nice drawings in
there, and it helped to put those duck stories
over and make them popular. Because they appeared
to go to real places.
Frank King (Gasoline Alley):
Have you noticed how many of those
characters are sub-morons? The old guy with the
donkey cart, the guy with the funny cap and the
girl chambermaid? All of that! They are just sub-morons!
The reader automatically feels superior to those
characters. It gives the reader a good feeling. I
think that that's one of the tricks of writing. I
never thought about it until I was analyzing that
Gasoline Alley one time, trying to think: Why do
I pick that thing up day after day and read it? I
don't like those characters. I just despise them!
Yet I keep on reading about them...
Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon):
I liked his drawing up to a point. It
seemed to me he began putting too much ink into
his stuff after he reached a certain point in
which his composition should have been clear. He
started putting much more ink into it. I would
just lose track of where the characters were. I
wish he'd put in a long-shot once in a while, so
I could tell where these people are. You're lost
in all this ink.
Hal Foster (Prince Valiant):
I could follow Prince Valiant - it
aroused quite a bit of sympathy in me. Prince
Valiant was beautifully illustrated and each
panel was a work of art. I don't think that I
could have come up with that, because I didn't
have the artistic background, the learning, you
might say, to draw that well. I would have had to
work on something much simpler.
Fred Opper (Happy Hooligan):
I never liked Happy Hooligan as a
character. I liked some of the characters that he
was in contact with much better. Happy Hooligan
seemed to me to be a person who didn't do
anything good in the world. He just blundered
around. Generally I would have had sympathy for
the straight guy, not for the supposed clown who
was the main character of the strip.
Winsor McCay (Little Nemo):
I most clearly remember Winsor McCay's
Little Nemo - wonderful drawings!
Winsor McCay was certainly one of the influences
in my life, because Little Nemo was one of the
first comic strips I can remember. It used to be
published in the San Francisco Examiner, which we
got on our farm. Those characters had a great
influence on me. I wasn't so much an admirer of
the drawings as I was of the story construction.
And my favorite of the characters was old Doctor
Pill, because he seemed to be a good guy. He was
protective, and trying to do the best he could,
while the clown-like guy with the cigar was just
fouling things up and making trouble and leading
the kids astray.
Elzie Segar (Popeye):
I loved the stories, but I didn't care
much for the drawings. The stories were very
funny.
Segar's drawing style: It was the simplicity of
it. He didn't have to put in a thousand lines to
show what his characters were doing; he just kept
them very simple and wide open so that you could
know what every character was doing and what he
was going to do. What I was getting out of Segar
was a method of putting into my stories the way
he put action and anticipation and all those
things into his stories.
COMIC
BOOKS IN GENERAL
On early inspirational
comics in general:
I was influenced by art techniques from
Billy de Beck (Snuffy Smith) to Hal Foster (Prince
Valiant). I'd idolize one style awhile, then
worship another. For story formats, I got most
training by analyzing Thimble Theater and the
Popeye scripts.
The newspaper comic strips I liked as a teenager
were mostly from the San Francisco papers: Happy
Hooligan, Katzenjammer Kids, Bringing Up Father,
Old Doc Yak, Little Nemo.
Elzie Segar's Popeye and other strips had a
strong influence on my art style and humor
creation.
I will say that Happy Hooligan wasn't among my
favorites, but Segar and his early Thimble
Theater, and cartoonists you wouldn't recognize,
who drew for the San Francisco Examiner. Back in
those years, in the early 1920s and before that
time, the San Francisco Examiner had a Sunday
section of humour and cartoons, and, really, it
was just a big magazine folder. It was full of
cartoonists' stuff. Some of those guys were
marvellous cartoonists. Those fellows were real
draftsmen in pen and ink - they all had
distinctive styles.
On contemporary weird comics
and superheroes:
The comic books of the 'golden years' of
the 40s, 50s, and 60s were all escapist reading
in my opinion. The kids who read Superman,
Plastic Man, and Tales from the Crypt were all
taking a trip. The fad for that form of escape is
now almost defunct. Comics have been replaced by
pot. I am pleased that I was able to be of some
value to the young trippers of those years.
As for Superman and all those type of stories,
they were quite an artificial thing. They did
have a little bit of the human element in them,
where Superman was trying to keep his identity
secret from Lois Lane. In most of the fighting
and the menaces and all, it was just complete
fabrication. It didn't seem to me to have much
depth.
I began seeing the first comic books come along,
Superman and some of those, and I would read
those and think, well, these are lousy stories.
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