I gave this far more thought then intended and left out so much.  Dozens of newspaper strips from Trog to The Fosdyke Saga to the Heart of Juliet Jones, programmes from Magic Roundabout to the Pogles to Pertwee Doctor Who, books from Oliver Strange's "Sudden" westerns to Lord of the Rings to Asmov's short stories, comics from the Eagle, The Beezer and Topper to British Marvel Ditko reprints and films from My Life as a Dog to The Big Blue to Planet of The Apes.  Then there's the illustrators, Frazetta and Krenkel, Heath Robinson and Arthur Rackham, Dave McKee and John Burningham, family particularly my father and his father,   Americans like Segar and Herriman, my maternal grandparents who turned me on to Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne westerns, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire musicals and people like Richard Widmark and Humphrey Bogart.  Not to mention the Jazz music and then the folk music.

 

As I say, there could and should have been so much.

But I had to narrow it down.

So what did I end up with?  Well centre to it all is Eddie Campbell.  I probably put Campbell on far too high an artistic pedestal but for me he's one of the best. Dave Sim and Paul Grist showed me, more than anyone in comics, the potential for using the page to not just tell a story but control it.  Feiffer and Blake taught me how stripped down a drawing could be and how that could fill it with more life than the most careful, photographic rendering could ever achieve.  The Lone Ranger, as well as representing everything I love in old style westerns, was key in my first steps in learning to draw.  T H White, Van Morrison and Noggin the Nog were all about approaches to storytelling.  Magician Robert Harbin introduced me to a paper based obsession that predated drawing, Origami.  Madeline was a lesson that most people had to wait for Neil Gaiman to discover, you can have an engaging story without very much happening at all.  Tintin followed Fieffer and Quentin Blake and showed me beautiful drawing could have life.  Garth stood in for all the comic strips that were around in my childhood and Kyle Baker reminded me I would probably never be funny.  Finally the oak tree was there to be the influence the geograpy of my childhood had on me.  I covered a good breadth of influences but looking at it I'm already making mental changes.

I just realised there are no architects on there.  I discovered Gaudi just after I first saw Planet of the Apes, looking for similar buildings in books in the library.  Frank Lloyd Wright followed soon after, beginning a fascination with architechtural drawing.  Arrrgh.

I need to do about 30 of these to give it a vague hint of reality.