TWCL

[Uncle Greedy]

Besides those I mentioned above, there are of course

Rand Holmes
Greg Irons
Ted Richards
Jose Gonzales

[Casual Notice]

Traegorn wrote:

Casual Notice wrote: Added all of the suggestions except Robert Crumb. Why? He's kind of important.

Because he is not a significant influence on the craft or business of comics. Yes, a lot of people cite him as an inspiration, but almost no one shows any influence of his style in their work. His artwork didn;t break any new ground (it actually looked backward to the spaghetti-leg art of 20's cartoons) nor did his professional life open any new doors.

By comparison, Moore, Gaiman, and Ennis contributed to the comic shop boom and the decline of CCA power with their mature plots and concepts. Moore and Gaiman took it even further and parleyed their successes into helping create DC's Vertigo line, which not only catered mostly to mature topics, but also broke new ground in terms of artists' rights to their own work in the industry.

Crumb's a creditable artist, but his entire claim to fame is that drug-addled hippies in the sixties thought he was hilarious. For off-main art influence, I'm more likely to point to Aragomes, Don Martin, Caldwell (of National Lampoon fame) or the various cartoonists who drew for Playboy in the fifties and sixties.
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[Clint Wolf]

I'm no big fan of Crumb's work, but he is an Eisner Hall of Fame inductee and widely regarded as the father of the Underground Comix movement which, despite being made up of a lot of hippies and Harvey Pekar, is at least as much of a chapter in American comics history as the 80s break that led to Vertigo.

Hell, Alan Moore started out doing cheaply published alternative 'zines in the style of Zap! There's an article here that does a good job of sorting through Crumb's impact, which is certainly different than, say, Jack Kirby's...

http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2011/08/who-is-this-crumb-guy-anyway/

"He wasn’t the very first underground cartoonist (and he was heavily influenced by Harvey Kurtzman’s proto-underground Mad and Help! magazines), but his Zap Comix #1 – released in 1968 – was the match that lit the comix tinderbox, energising a legion of like-minded cartoonists to join the movement...

...Though it lasted less than a decade, the underground movement changed comics forever. It demolished the notion that comics were only for kids, or that they could only deal with juvenile subject matter. Chris Ware has written (in Comments from Contemporaries) that ‘without [Crumb], there wouldn’t be any cartoonists of my generation.’ "

Now as I said, you can like him or dislike him (and his output)... but there's no question he is a Name To Know.
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[Casual Notice]

Quote:

...Though it lasted less than a decade, the underground movement changed comics forever. It demolished the notion that comics were only for kids, or that they could only deal with juvenile subject matter.

That's crap from the word go. It was only in the States that comics were considered children's fare (Asterix was never juvenile in treatment), and even if the statement were true for the world, the Marvel Silver Age (begun in 1962) had a greater influence on the maturation of comic outlook than any of Crumb's stoner giggle books.

He didn't invent underground comics; hell, half the guys on the list who did work before the Seventies augmented their criminally low salaries by drawing Tijuana Bibles.

Crumb's notability is entriely tied up in the self-importance of the Baby Boom generation, and speaking as a member of that oh so self-notable group, I can honestly say that we've spent the last fifty years masturbating to our own reflection in the mirror while telling everyone who would listen that that sticky substance was pure ambrosia.
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What I lack in sincerity, I make up for in sarcasm.
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[Clint Wolf]

I get that you have a bone to pick with Crumb's fame, if not apparently his entire existence.

I think trying to exclude him from the list of influential figures in comics is insane, but hey, at this point in the thread he's been talked about more than anyone else. I'd rather gush about someone like Herriman or Barks.
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[Casual Notice]

I don't have a problem with Crumb's fame. I like Crumb's art, and I'm glad he's been successful at it (as I understand it, he's a great guy, and totally deserves the fruits of his labors, as opposed to others on the list who spent their fifteen year careers whining about not being respected then wuit in a huff over "insults" that better men took in stride), but there's a difference between being famous and being influential in the form.

The Mona Lisa isn't a game changer because she's so pretty, or even her enigmatic smile, but because of what's behind her. In a time when backgrounds either avoided long panoramas or painted them with flat and vibrant (for the time) colors, DaVinci introduced the perspective of coloring and saturation. The forests behind Mona Lisa darken and fade with distance in a way that cannot be seen in contemporary paintings.

Of late, we westerners have come to confuse popular and enjoyable with significant and noteworthy. Avatar was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar despite being an amazingly bad film (that doesn't mean it wasn't enjoyable--I love the Harold and Kumar films but they aren't significant art, and they're all better than Avatar). At best, it should have been ominated for cinematography and other technological awards for the breakthroughs Cameron made in creating the film, but not the film as a whole.

Oreo cookies are great, and you can't argue with their popularity, but they are not fine dining, not matter how you slice them.
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[iaviv]

@Casual Notice - Yeah I pretty much agree with you. I guess I thought Crumb made a more significant impact. Never mind then.
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[Casual Notice]

Actually, I'm going to edit my own list and also provide justification for those that will remain.

Check the OP for the update.
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What I lack in sincerity, I make up for in sarcasm.
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[Tskingdom]

Nice list! (minor typos with Siegel and Sienkiewicz - or am I missing something with "(sp)" part, "Sex Party" or "Spelling" or "Starting Price", tells internetslang.com)

About Barks, in here (still Finland) most people, not just hardcore comic-geeks, know him -- and nowadays Don Rosa (whose carrier is strongly tied with works of Barks), who got treated like a star every time he visited. And Barks visited as well, at the age of 93. That was his first time travelling outside USA if I recall correctly.

(Mickey is basically hated, there's even a often used insult, vitun mikki hiiri, f*cking mickey mouse).

Sorry about off-topic and bad (in more than one way) language.
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[vaslittlecrow]

Don Rosa is absolutely fantastic!
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[Marscaleb]

Wow, really? You're quick to give lip service to Penny Arcade but you never mentioned Pete Abrams and his comic, Sluggy Freelance?
That comic was the inspiration for half -if not more than- any webcomic that is at least six years old, and dang near everything that started over ten years ago.
That was the comic that established not simply some common trends, but the very idea of what kind of content readers would be interested in. It pioneered the concept that a comic could move from being a simple gag-a-day to having lasting stories that have interest and feeling.

[Casual Notice]

Quote:

It pioneered the concept that a comic could move from being a simple gag-a-day to having lasting stories that have interest and feeling.

You might want to look a litle back before 2001 before you start making such staements. Lil Abner, Pogo, and even Popeye beat Sluggy to that particular punch. Like Crumb, I'm not going to contradict your statement that he inspired a lot of folks (although I'm inclined to believe that more were inspired by Keenspot and it's bastard child Keenspace than by any individual artist), but being on someone's list of inspirations isn't the same as being an influence on the form.

Holkins and Krahulik changed the form by treating it as a business and sticking with it in a professional manner. With the notable exception of Howard Tayler, no other webcomic artist has treated their comic like a product with a production schedule instead of a hobby with an income (Foglio doesn't count--he was a mainstream artist for a very long time before he determined that he could make a more reliable living from the web).
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What I lack in sincerity, I make up for in sarcasm.
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[ttallan]

I should think that if an artist is on a lot of subsequent artists' inspiration lists he or she is almost inevitably an influence on the form. (Although, not having ever read Sluggy despite having a webcomic that is 6+ yrs old, I can't speak to whether or not that particular artist should be on such a list.)

Also: Are you saying Foglio doesn't count as an early model of webcomic professionalism because he carried over his professionalism from before webcomics? Wha?
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[Zoe Robinson]

Casual Notice wrote:

Quote: It pioneered the concept that a comic could move from being a simple gag-a-day to having lasting stories that have interest and feeling. You might want to look a litle back before 2001 before you start making such staements. Lil Abner, Pogo, and even Popeye beat Sluggy to that particular punch. Like Crumb, I'm not going to contradict your statement that he inspired a lot of folks (although I'm inclined to believe that more were inspired by Keenspot and it's bastard child Keenspace than by any individual artist), but being on someone's list of inspirations isn't the same as being an influence on the form.

Agreed. Sluggy was popular, yes. It may have inspired people, yes. But pioneering that as a concept? Nope. That's as old as comics in general - The Yellow Kid did it, and you don't get much older than that. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if someone could find some examples of Foxy Grandpa doing that, too.
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