The Four Color Media Monitor

I was looking at this CBR interview with artist Gene Ha from last year, about a book he drew called Mae, and what his influences were, when this turned up:

Cimrteren is also filled with monsters and mad science. What influenced your creature design? What kind of horrors can readers look forward to?

The biggest influences are Maurice Sendak, Jill Thompson and Studio Ghibli. They're a way to push myself past my superhero habits. I wanted design for "Mae" to be bold and simple, with a big graphic punch. An artist develops personal style when they fail to copy someone else's work. I felt good about failing to ape them.

He drew (un-)inspiration from Sendak?!? That lunatic who revealed nasty, socially reprehensible fantasies about Republican politicians some time before he passed on? Oh yeah, Ha sure knows where to get his ideas from. My family once owned a copy of Sendak's most notable fairy tale, "Where the Wild Things Are". It really wasn't much of a story (the main protagonist throws a tantrum about the house and it looked like this wasn't presented as a negative act), with artwork that was crude and unappealing, and we sold it off years later at a used book store. According to Sendak, the creatures in the book were supposed to represent his parents/family, and I think he was being very unfair to them. Yet this is where Ha believes great inspiration lies? Yawn.

If he got ideas from Ghibli, one could wonder if that implies Hayao Miyazaki, he of the bizarre left-wing viewpoint that spoils everything (even Thompson's not particularly impressive), one more reason why I wouldn't place too much value on this new recent item Ha came up with. I'll never get why "auteurs" with such crude views always seem to be where these people go for wellsprings.

Labels: indie publishers, moonbat artists, politics