I read quite a lot of comics as a kid and in my early teens. I remember being about 4 or 5 when we had our first X-men and Spiderman comics with my little brother. Neither of us could read at the time but damn if they weren't captivating. We were gawked at them for hours on trying to decipher them.
There was a strip that my grandma used to clip for me from a magazine and we would read that together when i visited. Later we were allowed to go through some of my uncle’s old comics – mostly European works, like Adventures of Tintin by Hergé and Morris' Lucky Luke. At first they seemed kind of boring and strange compared to the superhero stuff, but they quickly grew on you. Then there were the basic stuff like Garfield, Donald Duck and Peanuts. Anywhere we would visit we would forage for comic books. Some were older black and white stuff like Tarzan, Lee Falk’s Phantom or Mandrake the Magician. It didn't much matter as long as it was sequential images.
They had a good selection at the library near my aunts so I got to devour some 2000AD stuff, Judge Dredd and Nemesis the Warlock. Works of Enki Bilal was very influential at the time. I remember reading works like Benoit Sokal’s Inspector Canardo, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Valerian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières. Now it was a long time and i definitely was a little too young to appreciate all of them. There is a lot i should revisit now to refresh my memory. Later there was stuff like Lobo and Spawn that were very exciting at the time. I never stopped enjoying comics but they would go into sort of backburner. I would pick up the occasional Heavy Metal magazine for a bus ride or buy some Finnish stuff from discount bins. Speaking of Heavy Metal I should mention Invisibles from Grant Morrison which kind of blew my mind at later age. There are few books I’ve been picking up in recent years that i have missed like Swamp Thing from Alan Moore and Cerebus by Dave Sim. Also some Batman books thanks to Kevin Smith(I was a Marvel guy at first).
I did go to some comic drawing courses as a kid, and enjoyed learning about the art. Guess I felt like I didn't have the patience to draw the same thing over and over, which kept me from going to that direction. Then again I did spend a lot of time drawing arms or legs repeatedly, trying to get it right; a single arm on a single sheet of paper. It drove my grandpa nuts who would supply the paper from his office.
I read few of Hunter S. Thompson’s books some years back and became familiar with the illustrations of Ralph Steadman. They were partial to sparking the desire to work with ink again.
In my early twenties I became interested in Zen and have admired the brushwork in calligraphy associated with it called Hitsuzendō. I've only recently begun incorporating that influence into my drawings and it’s not proving to be an easy amalgam.
I was hanging in DeviantArt during the first few years in art school and learned about the lowbrow or pop surrealism movement. At the time I would understand it as bunch of cartoonists and illustrators felt that their work wasn't appreciated by the art world, so they would start making paintings and having exhibitions. At the same time lot of people there were voicing their opinions against art education and art world in general. It did manage push my buttons. I of course loved comics and animation, and appreciated the skill of artists making them as such. Though It is what you do with your abilities that matters for me. Comics can very well be their own artwork that was not the problem. Art world can be pretentious and I hated parts of it as much as they did. But unlike those voices, I do love my Duchamp (who also drew cartoons) and dada. The idea that art equals skill in the strictest sense was beyond me. Ironically that is also what pushed me into practicing more with the ink techniques and going in this direction with my drawing.
So there is some background. I haven't looked into the scene much after then but it was intriguing. It was just some people that annoyed me and guess i annoy someone aswell; there is only so much eternally recurring debate you can deal with. I suppose having influences coming from the comics would fit some of my work near pop surrealism category, though I maybe aproaching from a different angle. At the time figured to myself I’m just doing nobrow art. It was little bit funnier back then - and used already.
Here are couple of drawings i did today:
