My wife got me this for the ole birthday and I love it.
If you like Bodé, you'll fucking love this.
So, for personal context, a lot of people compare my art to Bodé. I am a huge fan. But honestly I didn't discover Vaughn or Mark's work until I was 30 years old. And yes, you can certainly see a shift in how I draw before this and after it. I turned 30 in 2000 and it was around 2002-2003 that my cartoon art style really started to gel. Before that I was a stiffer, more boring artist, I believe. Hell, I'm not even sure how I drew shit in the 90s.
But let's peel it back a little more because Bodé's style had an impact on me BEFORE that time. How? Because Vaughn's work had already infiltrated pop culture, which infiltrated me. I watched Ralph Bakshi's Wizards when I was about 17. I watched Fire and Ice around that time, and Heavy Metal. I had issues of Heavy Metal. I owned Richard Corben comics. I was into Mike Ploog and Frank Frazetta. Vaughn Bodé is a large figure in that same lineage, though I wasn't able to land on him until a decade later. His influence was in me via Wizards, which of course was immensely influenced by Bodé.
We artists don't like being compared to other artists too closely. It feels weird. I don't "draw like Vaughn Bodé", I draw like J.V. West. And J.V. West was inspired by Bodé, Frazetta, Corben, and Willingham like a bomb.
Today when people say my work reminds them of Vaughn Bodé I am humbled. I can't think of a better compliment, to be honest.
I think it's perfectly fine to be heavily influenced by a certain style. In my writing, fiction that is, I'm a no nonsense straight to the meat of it type of dude. Very little flowerly language, not a lot of description. It's the big ideas and the pacing I'm going for, not the prose. This is the basic bitch Tor and Baen style of the last few decades. Haha. That's what happens when that's all you read for decades.
ReplyDeleteI console myself with notions that my content is original, if not my technique... :-\
I think this also toes into imposter syndrome as well. To anyone reading this, I'm north of 40, have a doctorate, a few novels under my belt, and I STILL think I'm a fake unoriginal talentless hack. Gah! The feeling never ends. Hahaha.
Influence is a positive thing, and unavoidable. I think you can tell when someone is literally aping another creator. But even then I think creators grow and change. Mike Hoffman is an artist who started out, I think, as a Frazetta hack. His style has changed a bit over time and I can tell a Hoffman from a Frazetta, I believe, even if it's a Frazetta I am not familiar with.
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