Non comic stuff that has influenced your work

I figured I'd start this thread for people to give random examples of things in other artforms or life in general that have shaped their current style.

F'rinstance: Growing up, my Dad worked in a supermarket. As a kid, I wound up fascinated by the packaging, and the merchandising characters that adorned the various products. As I've grown older, I find myself resurrecting motifs and styles in my own work. It's probably influenced me to have a somewhat nostalgiac commercial look in a lot of my stuff.

In a more recent example: While I had always dug cool colors, it was the movie AMELIE that really got me thinking about what I could do with color in comics. Watching the film and listening to the interview with the cinematographer, it really got me thinking more about how colors work together and how you could use them to make your compositions bolder and more eye catching.

Anyone else?

Video games. Wondering things while I play like: "Why doesn't this oil ignite when I shoot it with fire?" or "How come I can't just kick his ass instead of standing there whatching(sp?) him like an idiot while he runs away during the cut-scene."

First of all, great subject. I was actually just thinking about this last night. I was thinking about what I was drawing influences from(in regards to all my work, not just the tiny comic aspect), and most of it was coming from non-comic sources.

I mean, I grew up with the Marvel Universe as pretty much a 5th food group for me, so comic books/cartooning/animation is definitely an undeniable influence in all my work. But since this post is about non-comic sources......

I draw a heap of inspiration from music. But it's definitely a vague an non-literal type of inspiration. For example, I love old school hip hop with a passion. It doesn't mean my characters walk around dressed up in gold chains and fat laces. Hip hop culture is much more prevalent in my design work, but it's still influences Squaresville, albeit in a minute, intangible way. ( I do have a new comic idea swimming around in my head which will draw more heavily from this influence)


Other influences are just every day life. Little observations and such.
Now that I think about it, pretty much everything. Dave Sedaris, Will Ferrell, Spike Jonze, Andy Warhol, the list goes on.

Movie, literature, music, anthopology...everything really. Almost everytime I read or see something new it fills me with possibilities, even if I mostly want to react against it rather than imitate it.

Oh man, I don't even know. I'm interested in so much stuff in a lot of different ways. I have a suspicion that I pretty much just gather a little something from everything, like pollen and lint, and then mush it together into one big mess.

I tend to think up a lot of interesting situations and stories when I'm listening to music. Or sometimes a movie or TV show gives me an idea. It's hard to say... I guess the whole world can be an influence, if you know where (and how) to look! :)

The comic was just a pipe dream untill I told people about it, and they told me I'd never be able to pull it off, and keep doing it, or even draw in a way that would be appealing to anyone.

When you tell me I can't do something, I do it just to prove you wrong. Reverse psychology works very well on me... sigh.

What else influenced my work? My life, and everything in it. All of my comics are influenced by life events of some kind. I can't think of anything more solid than that.

Charlotte's Web was the inspiration for my whole comic, as some havee guessed.

All the crazy, crazy people out there.







...that's it.

The stupid things that I do in real life are a huge inspiration for my comic.

I also draw from Laurel and Hardy movies, Wayne's World, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the Back to the Future trilogy, Dave Barry, Ted L. Nancy, The Phil Hendrie Show, The Rick Emerson Show, and years of cynicism over idiotic TV and radio commercials. Also the early years of Nickelodeon with Double Dare and You Can't Do That on Television.

In addition, I credit my sister Julie and my friends Dave and Daniel, who each have an awesome sense of humor that's quite infectious.

Lastly, I get ideas from every road trip and vacation I ever done took.

Well my comic is about time travel, which is something that has always fascinated me. The best stories of anything are about time travel if you ask me. Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, Star Trek First Contact - they're all great. I wanted to tell a time travel story myself, and these various things are probably the reason why.

I was a big fan of art deco posters (such as Toulouse-Lautrec's work, or the Bieres du Muse poster that hung in every arty kid's room in my dorms).

Chinese brush paintings may not have had a direct effect on my comic's art style, but ironically their sparsity influenced the writing of many of them.

When you tell me I can't do something, I do it just to prove you wrong. Reverse psychology works very well on me... sigh.

Damn, that sounds a lot like me. However, I'm equally turned on by compliments.

In response to the thread, I'd have to say I've always found insanely clever melodramas hilarious. I absolutly love things like the Naked Gun series, and then I really like things that just stem totally far off the reality scale, involving a hero and a source of all evil :P.

... what is this icon? :revsam: ....

My art is influenced mostly by comics, but my writing:

Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, Isaac Asimov, Donald Westlake, Cervantes, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Aesop, Mythology (Greek, Roman, Norse and Native American mostly)

I love Norse mythology... I've written a lot of short stories inspired by it.

my friends sarah and caroline. thats what the entire comics about. just the kind of things they would do.

hmm...probably batman: TAS. i always liked how it could go from action to drama and not miss a beat, have good humor, dialouge and of course, nailed all the batman characters better then anyone ever had before.

...thats partly why i keep taking my comic in a dramatic, more serious direction. also, yu fleeng puu reminds me of mark hammil's joker.

powerpuff girls and cowboy bebop were major, too.

my buddy, mustapha, was a help, also. hes in california doing animation work now (the lucky bastard!), but when were were in high school, he'd makestop motion animation films, then i started helping him, and we'd make these cheesy SMA shorts. then when i went to college, i got a digital camera, and made 7 SMA clayton heat short films. i even bought space on the public access channel and aired them!

...and thus, clayton heat was born.

In this comic (http://www.succubi.org/db/40.html), I got the narration from a homeless person standing on the corner of Oxnard and Van Nuys. He was just standing there talking loudly about crossing the street and shoeshines (what I have in the comic is pretty much verbatim.) Despite the fact that he was obviously mentally unbalanced, I thought it was quite poetic and beautiful and wrote one of my strips around it.

X-files was the first inspiration for my comic. I got addicted to the show and developed this form of a comic. They even filmed that show here for a while. I literally live 2 blocks away from Scully's tv apartment.
It was destiny that I make this comic.

well, maybe not destiny... but, I was influenced.:grin:

Commercials. Weither they be tv, radio, roadside posters, they all seem to attract me somehow...

Like I can see this unuse potential of creativity wasted on consumerism...

Or some other vague snobby artsy statement.

But really ! Commercials ! Woo !

Man, it's hard to think of a non-comic influence without just vaguely pointing at everything that ever existed since the dawn of time! Immediately, I think of animation. I've been more inspired by stuff on TV than comic books.
Artists of other mediums provide influences all the time. I think music is probably the one that stands out, because it's the most unusual influence for a comic. But I can't help it. When I hear a song, I get a specific mental image setting that goes along with the music of a song, and it's different for each song. Sometimes songs work for providing abstract material like that, and I can work it into my comic.

Just to clarify: You don't have to have one thing that's defined everything. Even if it's something that you feel was an interesting influence on one strip that's cool. I just don't want people to feel like they have to have some one big example. I do appreciate the respones though, they've been cool.

The movie Hackers.... As well as other films. I'm very into my movies, but mostly realistic comedy. I've tried to adopt a realistic dialogue style in all my writing and I feel that really permeates in our comic. Furthermore, most everything I do has a little gonzo flavour from Dr. Hunter S Thompson. Thompson has made weirdness seem very normal to me, so when people say that our comic is fucking weird, I just thank them and point them towards a random Thompson book.

I think a lot of my work in journalism prior to taking on Combustible Orange has allowed Combustible Orange to stay grounded in reality despite some fairly odd situations. But I think this is degenerating into pretentiousness, so I must run, run into the hills.

Basically just politics, and how stupid the media is.

I just realized how funny teachers can be today.

"[...] and he was killed at a jousting tournement. After that he died."

I have to steal this for my comic one of these days...

Rao, I had a poetry prof who swears commercials are the start of the next big art genre. I know they're my favorite part of SNL and other sketch comedy shows. And as much as I hate the real ones, they really do seem to get better creatives than some of the shows we're being fed.

Firefly is the biggest influence in a comic I'm working on. Other influences include:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Star Trek: TNG
Kevin Smith Movies
Trigun
Buffy
Angel
FF
Simpsons

There are three characters named after towns I live(d) in, and several others named after towns in the county I live in.

Spaceghost
Seinfeld
Kids in the Hall
Red Bull
Insomnia
Denny's
Your mom.

Futurama. And it's a damn shame they cancelled it!
Really, I liked that show even more then The Simpsons (which is, naturally, also one of my favourites (although certain season 14 episodes really suck (that's right, I'm using 3 brackets at the same time))).

Anyway, I consider South Park and Futurama (and The Simpsons, but that goes without saying) one of the finest cartoons ever made and a great source of inspiration.


PS: I liked Freakazoid and Family Guy too... DAMN SHAME they cancelled it!!

Influences hmmm?

I'd have to say (though maybe not apparent):
Kevin Smith films
Teen movies (the early ones like Bill & Ted)
Cheesy Sci-fi (Red Dwarf, Galaxyquest, that kinda stuff)
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (in all its incarnations forms)

Simpsons has always been an influence, but I'd have to say that in the past few years Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm have been major influences. They take "nothing" and find humor in it, and they find humor in bad situations, too, and that inspires me to do the same thing. Then I bring that outlook to my comic.

Both those shows have also influenced how I think about conversations and people talking to each other.