I got into comics through Tintin. Of course I had read stuff like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes before then, but my first real “comic book” experience was reading Tintin. Those books are fantastic. However, thanks to their early influence, they’ve made my life in comics very very difficult.

One of the things which is quite noticeable at a glance in Tintin is that nearly every single panel has a background. Not only that, but nearly every single panel shows their entire bodies. Rarely do the Tintin comics ever do a closeup. It’s quite remarkable if you think about it because we’re usually taught not to write comics this way. We’re taught to keep things variable moving from head shots, to wide shots, to establishing shots, etc. But in Tintin, everything is pretty static and laid out, almost diagramic in it’s depictions.

Anyway, I read Tintin and got into comics that way. Then I took a weird detour and moved on over to Japan reading Manga and watching a lot of Anime. Like most young impressionable kids, I imitated the stuff I loved and Anime radically altered my drawing style. I’ve always hated backgrounds, and Anime provided me with many excuses not to draw them, especially in emotional comics where frequently pages were simply body parts (heads, eyes, mouths, etc) just floating on the page with some random gradients.

I made several comics in college, following the techniques I had learned from my professors about varying your shots... but the one thing which always bugged me was backgrounds. Without them my pages looked like crap (especially in black and white), but with them they looked 10 times better. I tried to limit the backgrounds to maybe one elaborate establishing shot here and there, but the moment I started coloring my comics in Photoshop, Tintin’s influence came back.

Since then, I have this annoying urge to draw the backgrounds in almost every single panel. I know I don’t HAVE to... but the urge is there and I hate it. I hate drawing backgrounds, especially since I’m not the most talented draftsman. In some TinTin books the level of detail is simply outrageous, and I don’t want to go down that path. But I just can’t help it... my comics NEED backgrounds.

So there you have it... Because of Tintin’s influence at an early age, I am compelled to torture myself with drawing backgrounds in almost every single shot. Billions of blistering blue barnacles, Tintin! Why’d you have to do that to me?