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What’s the difference between being influenced and being inspired? Check these definitions from the Encarta® World English Dictionary (© 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.):

In-spire:
1. to encourage people into greater efforts or greater enthusiasm or creativity
3. to stimulate somebody to do something, especially creative work or the making of art

In-flu-ence:
1. to persuade or sway somebody
2. to have the power to affect something

These are the definitions of the words as verbs, as they’ll pertain to the discussion more than influence being used as a noun.

Now, we’ve all been inspired to make comix at some point, and likely by someone already doing comix. Likely you’ll tell someone who asks that you’ve been influenced by so-and-so when referring to your drawing or writing style.

My writing influences include Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. You could include Phil Hester and Roger Stern, too, though to a lesser extent. As far as drawing goes (and I know I shouldn’t be drawing, but there you go) my influences have included John Byrne, Terry Austin, Neal Adams, Svetlana Chmakova and Nobuhiro Watsuki. You’d have to include Jiro Taniguchi, too, I suppose as the two volumes of ICARO that I recently picked up have had an effect, as well as Nick Bantock and Dave McKean.

But how many people have influenced how I approach putting it all together? Not inspiration, so much, as actual influence? Larry Young is one such person, so is Enki Bilal. So is my friend Rob Schamberger.

I’ve tried draw like Adams and Byrne and Svet and even Watsuki. I’ve tried to ink like Terry Austin and learned loads about it from Ande Parks. I’ve never tried to write like Gaiman or Moore or Ennis, but I’ve pursued ideas like Ellis does and I’ve got loads of ‘em. However, I’m not any of these people, and I don’t want to be. I want to be my own kind of creator. I want to create stories that make people think, that challenge readers to maybe even explore the ideas that I present even further.

That’s more an influence than inspiration, I think.

Larry Young espouses (or did, any way, it’s been a while since I checked his site) the idea of Doing It Yourself. He wrote a series of articles that give the reader the lowdown on what it takes to make comix that were collected into the magnificent TRUE FACTS book. Bilal makes comix across the pond in Europe, where the form is far, far more respected and given more room to breathe. It’s amazing what can be presented in sixty-six pages if the creator is not constrained by an attitude of ‘comix are for kids’. Despite that tired cliché having been disproved since about 1985, American comix still tend to mire themselves in spandex and pretty colors. It’s a truism that black and white comix don’t sell all that well, and that comix presented in color must be more expensive and thus don’t sell as well as they used to. For instance, in Europe one can buy a graphic album in color, about seventy pages in total, for the equivalent of fifteen bucks, American. Here in the states, such an album will sit on most retailers’ shelves until the publisher allows it to be returned, perhaps selling a copy or two in any given city.

The reasons for this are likely that the story doesn’t feature well-known creators or characters, and Americans won’t shell out for something they don’t recognize. If they did, there might be more variety on the shelves. In 2003, the best-selling book in France was a graphic album, and it sold in excess of 400,000 copies. That was the second book of Bilal’s BEAST TRILOGY, I’m told, and comix used to sell that well here in the States. For instance, the first issue of Todd MacFarlane’s SPIDER-MAN sold 3,000,000 copies, ultimately. Not that it was worth a damn, but the collector mentality definitely made Todd a very, very rich man. So why can’t American creators hope for 200,000 copies sold of a graphic novel?

Rob Schamberger is constantly trying out new approaches and new ways to get his stories out in front of people. He is an inspiration to anyone who wants to pay attention to him, but he’s influenced me by just being out there and trying. I’d given up drawing a couple of years ago, but now I’m willing to give it a shot again because I’ve been watching him over the last year or so really working hard to keep making comix. The usual deal with writers is that we find an artist and the artist then flakes out on us and doesn’t want to make a commitment after having said ‘yes’ to something. Schamberger says ‘fuck it’ and makes comix anyway. He’s decided that Moebius is a worthy example and is pursuing a set of graphic novels called THE BLACK CHAMBER, rolling several old ideas into a new one and then illustrating it himself, trying several different styles.

His work on this title is something that I think about. I’m not inspired to make comix because of him. I’m not inspired to draw my own stories because he is and I’m having the same trouble that he does with artists. I’m not inspired to do a graphic novel because he is. I’ve already got it in me to try and accomplish these things. I’m influenced in how I’m approaching my own work because of what I’ve watched him do. I look at his work, and think “Why couldn’t I do that”? I mean, I write different kinds of things than he does, but why couldn’t I do what he’s doing? Why not?

So, I can. I will. I am.

In trying to explain this by writing it down and then really thinking some more about it, it’s true that I may never hit with any kind of impact on the world of comix, and I really don’t care about that any more. My dream is to write one graphic novel a year for a publisher that will pay me money to do it. If that dream never comes true, fine. If it does, it will be because I’ve done the work I needed to do and did it in such a way that it was noticed and given a chance to live or die on its own merit in the American Market as it currently exists. And that work will be the sum total of all the influences that make up my work, stirred with my imagination.