Dusting off some of those art books at the back of my shelf, I'm revisiting some of my influences and inspirations from my days as a beginner. Let's start with the great erotic science fiction artist Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri (1944 - ) and his character Druuna -- a beautiful, strangely masochistic woman struggling to survive in a diseased, dystopian world of sadistic mutants, madmen, and perverts. Drawn with highly detailed, painstaking pen work, the Druuna stories don't make much sense, but that isn't the point. The point is that nobody draws the female figure better than Serpieri, and the raven-haired Druuna is the Platonic Ideal of porn stars, as if there was anything platonic about her adventures.

Bill Ward's fantasy women, their pneumatic breasts barely contained by their skintight dresses, tottering along on five-inch stiletto heels with a cigarette holder in their opera-gloved hands, are the ultimate fetish objects. Ward (1919 - 1998), whose artistic priority was always the next quick sale, mastered an unusual, high speed drawing technique of Conté crayon on large sheets of newsprint. Even in the 1950s, those big sheets were a headache for magazine printers, but the charcoal-like effects were gorgeous to look at, and publishers, especially at Ward's home turf of the Humorama line of men's digests, wanted as much of the artist's output as he could provide.

Ward's only real rival in the cartoon pin-up business, Jack Cole (1914 - 1958), started out as a neophyte comic book artist who rose through the ranks and went on to create Plastic Man, then reinvented himself as a neophyte gag cartoonist whose beautiful women, rendered in a virtuoso ink wash technique, lead him from Humorama to Hugh Hefner's brand new Playboy magazine, where his stunning watercolor paintings were a monthly highlight. I envied the hell out of Cole's brushwork -- too bad I didn't bust my ass trying to emulate it. Cole was on the verge of reinventing himself yet again, this time as a successful syndicated newspaper strip cartoonist, when he inexplicably committed suicide at the age of 43.

Dan DeCarlo (1919 - 2001), a struggling young illustrator, spent a weekend preparing a sample comic book page, then took that and his portfolio to the Timely Comics offices, where editor Stan Lee hired him on the spot. Quickly becoming a specialist in teen humor comics, the impossibly prolific DeCarlo not only picked up extra work at other companies (including Archie Comics), but he became a leading contributor of erotic gag cartoons to the Humorama digests as well. There's a thin line separating DeCarlo's fun-but-innocent high school girls from the blatantly sexualized women of his pin-up cartoons; you don't have to look too closely at some of those gag panels to see very buxom, adult versions of Betty and Veronica. By 1958, DeCarlo had taken a full-time job at Archie Comics, where he went on to become the company's definitive artist (creating Josie and the Pussycats as well).

So how did so many masters of Good Girl art come to influence a gay, furry cartoonist who likes to draw boys? Who was putting all their knowledge, craft, and hunger for success into drawing the sexually objectified men I liked to look at and wanted to make the subject of my own pictures?

Long story short: no one. Oh, there was Tom of Finland, but his work always bored me. Burne Hogarth's Tarzan was strapping but sexless, and while there were numerous, superbly talented cartoonists and illustrators who could execute generic, square-jawed Action Guys in their sleep, I was basically adrift. By the time I discovered the erotic gay illustrators Harry Bush and Sadao Hasegawa, I'd cobbled together a style of my own, for better or worse.