Influences...

Hello all of you incredible Afro Stachers! Welcome to another Fabulous Frog Blog! I hope you all had a great week!

Recently, I’ve been asked who my influences are as a writer. I actually had to think about this for a while. I wasn’t thinking of who I’m a fan or reading. I actually enjoy reading a whole bunch of writers and authors.

When it comes to reading comics, naturally we all have our favorite writers and artist. One of my favorites is John Ostrander. I was first turned on to him when he was doing The Spectre. What an incredible comic. What he did was take an incredibly powerful character, if not the most powerful character in the DC universe, and bring him down to a human level. Not taking away his powers, but just making him look through human eyes. I just saw that DC released his run of The Spectre in some trades. Check it out if you get the chance.

Naturally, I’m also a fan of Frank Miller. I can’t really remember what the first thing I read by him. I do remember reading Sin City and thought it was incredible. And then I read Daredevil: Man Without Fear mini-series. Wow! Such good stuff!

Geoff Johns is another writer I’m a big fan of. His run on The Flash was so good and so much fun to read, especially his stuff with the rogue’s gallery. Then when he was doing Green Lantern and brought Hal Jordan back was just really good too. I couldn’t believe how he tied everything together that just made sense to me. I really enjoyed it.

Of course, I don’t read only comics. I do enjoy the “occasional” novel.

I’ve really enjoyed Andrew Vachss in the past. I say “past” only because it’s been a while since I’ve actually picked up one of his books. What I have read by him were his gritty crime novels. I didn’t feel that they were mysteries, just his main character beating the crap out of people until he finds what he’s looking for.

I used to read a whole lot of Dean Koontz as well. It’s been a while, but I did enjoy his stories as well. I’m a fan of the supernatural horror stories that he had written. Well, I like lots of supernatural stuff. It also helped that most of his stories took place in Southern California, which made the stories more interesting to me since I’m familiar with the areas.

Another author I have been reading lately is Jim Butcher. So far, I’ve only read a few of the Dresden Files. This is a perfect series for a guy like me who’s into geekdom and pop culture and supernatural stories from a wizard detective. I highly recommend reading this series. It’s so good and so much fun!

Now, of course there are a whole lot of other people and books I like to read. I could keep listing them, but we would be here forever. These are just a few I would comment on because this is a geek blog.

But this brings me back to the original question of who are my influences. I would like to say that all these writers have influenced me in my writing. But in all honesty, when I sit down to write, I never say, “I’m going to write like Geoff Johns.” When I write, I just sit down and write. The only real thing I think about in my style of writing is from a book called If You Can Talk, You Can Write, by Joel Saltzman. He pretty much says just talk on the page. Clean it up later. That’s what I do. I think I am more influenced by what I’ve learned about literary devices in English classes. So I think my style of writing is my own. And I just hope to do the best that I can do. And hopefully you all enjoy it as well.

That’s about it for this week. I hope to see you all next time! Until then, be good to each other