SkunkyArt | UberMan5000 — Influence Map

ROALD DAHL - As a kid, I wasn't much of a reader, but I read Dahl so damn much back then; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches... hell, even Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, that bizarre (for Dahl) sequel to Chocolate Factory! Weirdly, though, I never read The BFG. Even so, I like to think Dahl has played a role in my outlook and my sense of humour.

DISNEY - Fantasia in particular. My childhood was during the Disney Renaissance, mostly between Beauty and the Beast (the first film I saw in a theatre) and Mulan. By the time I grew into (and before I grew back out of) the "too old for Disney" phase, they were churning out Fantasia 2000 and Dinosaur, so I probably got out just in time (missing Lilo and Stitch was regrettable, though). Fantasia remains my favourite Disney film, and probably the one that has the strongest influence on why Disney remains to me such an artistic powerhouse.

CALVIN AND HOBBES - I read these comics a lot as a kid, and they're the only ones that I still find remotely interesting today (besides maybe Peanuts). I loved the expressive ways it was inked by Bill Watterson, and the situations that the kid and tiger always got themselves in were a delight to watch. It remains to me a testament to the importance of imagination.

NINTENDO - I got my first NES when I was five, and I've pretty much been all over Nintendo since then. I was into everything: Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Pikmin, Kirby, Excitebike, Startropics... Nintendo games had this kind of effervescent quality about them that just made them so much fun, even years later.

MYST - I first played Myst around 1995, on my friend's PC (I still have his disc on my shelf there). It introduced to me the concept of immersive storytelling, just dropping you right in the middle of a situation and letting it come together as you go along. I like to think that had some influence on how I write stories today. It was also a game that showed me how cool computers can be, and also helped develop my sense of logical thinking. My friend was stuck on the Stoneship Age until I deduced that he could drain the water out of that chest on the bottom of the lighthouse so that it would float back to the top when he changed the water flow. That was pretty gratifying.

NELVANA - When I was a kid living in Canada, Nelvana cartoons were all over the airwaves. Nelvana's list of television cartoons, most of them adapted from comics and novels, gave me a wide berth of other media to pursue later in life. I liked watching the series based on things like Tintin, Pippi Longstocking, Beetlejuice, Sam & Max, Rupert, and so many others. Their original productions were also great: Stickin' Around, Ned's Newt, Inspector Gadget... it was good being a kid with Nelvana on the tube. They're still around producing 2D animation for television; I'd like to work for them someday.

MONTY PYTHON - My dad had two vinyl Monty Python albums, Monty Python's Previous Record (pictured there) and The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Executive Version). The Previous Record contained some of Python's best bits, from Argument Clinic to Theory on the Brontosaurus to Australian Table Wines, it was a healthy block of surreal British humour to serve as a bedrock for what I found really, really funny. The Holy Grail record, too, motivated me to suss out the movie, and things progressed naturally from there.

DOUGLAS ADAMS - More British Humour? Geez! I was only tangentially aware of Adams during high school, since my sister would keep carrying on about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I didn't quite get it. This was mainly because I thought it was an actual hitchhiker's guide of the galaxy, which made me confused. ( Doh!

). Anyways, I read the series in college, and I loved the way Adams would make a whole strange universe, then just casually discard it when the universe's punchline got delivered. I loved his understated wit; I still think that "the idea of flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss" is the funniest bloody thing. I'm not just an H2G2 man, though; in some ways, I find the more mature Dirk Gently books far more hilarious!

PIXAR - Pixar rushed onto the scene in 1995 with Toy Story, catching me at the tail-end of my wide-eyed childhood. Their superbly original storytelling, and they ways they used computers as tools to bring toys and cars to life instead of as number-crunching machines, was a sensation to me. They're an animator's film studio; they let Disney wear the albatross of corporate ominousness while they spend their time letting rats make really good soup and letting garbage-disposal robots fall in love. It wasn't all great, though: I hated A Bug's Life (I much preferred Antz, which came out the same year from Dreamworks, probably the ONLY time I'll prefer a Dreamworks film to a Pixar film), and I recently found out Joss Whedon helped write Toy Story. This just makes me feel really weird for some reason.

MACINTOSH - The first computer I ever used was one of the Macintosh 512k's my school had in 1992 (we were slightly behind the curve). I had so much fun on that thing: I wrote stories, I drew pictures with Kid Pix, I played Hangman, and most importantly, I learned what computers could do. Using this felt so much more useful than the IBM PC we got at home; that big grey box that I couldn't make do anything. Every classroom, as well, had a more modern Macintosh LC520, where we got to play games like Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego, Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, and other such stimulating activities. Even back then, I loved the design of the LC520; its proportions seemed perfect, and I liked the way System 7 was laid out. It was kind of a disappointment when I went to Junior High next year and all the computers were IBMs running Windows 98.

NEIL GAIMAN - I've really only gotten into his work very recently, so he probably hasn't had much bearing on the way I write or draw, but he remains one of those figures that gets me creatively jazzed up when I'm feeling in the pits. His work embodies offbeat, creative fantasy, from the phantasmagorical Mirrormask to the dark and whimsical The Graveyard Book. He's helped my modern tastes in literature expand, considering how stunted they were in my childhood.

HENRY SELICK - I regret stuffing him into one square a little, but if I'm honest, his output didn't have much opportunity to leave a huge impact on me (and I only had one square left anyway). Though I knew about The Nightmare Before Christmas (I still maintain that's a Henry Selick movie, not a Tim Burton movie), I never got to see it. I loved James and the Giant Peach, though, and I adored Coraline. I love idiosyncratic filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick, and Selic is one of the most idiosyncratic I know!