Comics—or, in the vernacular, “comix”—are currently looming particularly large in the zeitgeist. Never have they been so celebrated, so venerated, so respectable. Even the Museum of Modern Art in New York City has gotten into the act with its show, “Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making,” a gathering of artworks in various media which borrow in some way from comic strips and animated cartoons. Two recent parallel exhibitions, at New York’s Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum (“Masters of American Comics”), represented the first major museum examinations of this vastly popular art form, celebrating the work of artists from Jack Kirby and Will Eisner to R. Crumb and Chris Ware.

Last fall, the Society of Illustrators’ American Museum of Illustration mounted a retrospective show from Fantagraphics chronicling 30 years of culture-altering comix and graphic novels. Museums of comic art in New York City and San Francisco also collect, preserve and display comix and cartoon art. In September 2006 Geppi’s Entertainment Museum opened in Baltimore, with 16,000 square feet devoted entirely to comix since the late 1800s. For over a century, roughly paralleling the evolution of graphic design as a form of mass media, comic strips and comic books have had a huge influence on graphic designers. Not surprisingly, the combination of graphic impact, vivid coloration and powerful narratives has inspired designers, many of whom can recall how comix shaped their own creative expressions, often from early childhood. Todd Weinberger, creative director of DLG Media Holdings, remembers, “I was drawn to each comic’s masthead and each superhero’s icon or logo. The Green Lantern and the Flash’s logos encouraged me to start studying icons and not just logotypes. You could tell whether someone was a hero or villain by their logo’s color palette and type treatment.”

Ash Gibson, art director of artwordspictures.com, says, “I grew up in north London in the ’70s. Every Saturday morning my dad would take my brother and I down the road to buy a comic whilst he got the paper. I also discovered a box of Marvel and DC comics my dad had bought in the States in the ’60s. They were clearly the real deal and fascinating. In my teen years, I read, and incessantly copied, the drawings from 2000AD, Tintin and some reissues of the first Dan Dare series from the ’50s, among others. I think there was something about the creation of fictional worlds with drawing that was riveting to me.

“Looking back on it, as someone who was about to spend my life making type and image tell stories, the fascination was twofold: the excitement of [superhero] stories in a type-and-image format, and the authenticity of the original product, the feel of the newsprint, and the branding on the covers that said it was the original. I also fell in love with Howard the Duck and Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. Their use of space and pure line work had a graphic hipness … it felt cool and beautiful. Even now its line work and sense of composition are still my absolute favorite, but it is the visual pacing and compositional surprise that I always refer back to when working out some nuts-and-bolts type and image problem.”

“As a child I read a lot of comic books and was always drawing and painting my favorite characters,” recalls Ian Spanier, photo editor of Doubledown Media. “Comic heroes from X-Men, Spider-Man and even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—before they became commercialized—all had great artists working on them. At the time, I sought out special events where the artists would be doing signings and showing their best work. A couple of years ago, when I started shooting for Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazines I really saw the similarity of the size and structure of the bodybuilders to the comic book heroes from my youth. I started drawing my ideas for the portraits as I would have drawn a comic book hero. On my shoots, I tried to incorporate the drama of the light, shading and highlighting of the musculature into the portraits, just like some of the comic book characters that Marvel put out.”

“Oh man, comics were huge in my development as a graphic designer,“ says Rommel Alama, an art director at Harris Publications. “Superheroes always had a strong sense of graphic identity, from insignias on their costumes to their full names as logos on the covers of each comic. Each logo had to relate to each character, like Black Lighting’s lightning bolts coming out of the letterforms. The stories and designs always were larger than life, and were a huge attraction for a kid growing up in the late ’70s and early ’80s. So, when one of my art directors later in my career told me that my work overall was a bit too loud and bold, I thought, ‘Damn, that’s what I was going for all along.’

“Two years ago, when I was still the AD of XXL at Harris Publications, I was asked to be a part-time creative director of Harris Comics, which publishes Vampirella,” says Alama. “Pays next to nothing. Naturally, I jumped on it and have a lot of fun while letting my other deadlines on my paying assignments slide just a little. I became a designer because I thought it was a blast. I’m still there.”

Art director Michael Mrak had a comix epiphany: “Comics and comic books were a huge influence on my desire to become a graphic artist. Reading Peanuts by Charles Schulz was a weekly obsession: The bold use of colors and simple lines demonstrated elegant ways to solve problems. Other comics did this but none evoked the feelings that Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang did. When I was in college, though, I realized that the people who did comics actually had JOBS doing something that they enjoyed. While in college, my friends and I put together a comic book for the comic book club that published comic-related art at Syracuse University. It was my first real foray into the world of graphic design—incidentally, almost all of the people involved in this project went on to careers in graphic design, web design or illustration. It opened my eyes to the very real possibility of doing design or illustration for a living.”

Jonathan Halling, design director of National Geographic Kids magazine, describes its style as “comics meet internet. In our multi-layered, super-colored book, we incorporate comic styles and techniques constantly. Whether we are using word/thought balloons, ‘KAPOW’ signs in action sequences, or simply designing frame-by- frame stories, we create cartoon-influenced design every day. “My own earliest influences were Mad magazine … Don Martin’s ‘Silly Answers to Stupid Questions,’ Sergio Aragones’ ‘Spy vs. Spy’ … and television comics like Kimba the White Lion, Spider- Man, Batman—live-action, comic graphics—George of the Jungle and Speed Racer. I always try to remember those silliness factors when designing for kids, and try to impress upon my design team the necessity of ‘keeping it real’ and funny.”

Art director Alberto Diaz started reading comics to help him learn English when he first arrived in America. He loved comic graphics and practiced his drawing skills with the hope of becoming an artist for Marvel or DC. When he realized how competitive it was, he “settled” for becoming a graphic designer. “From designing posters and flyers for the rock bands I used to play with to my current job as deputy art director, the comic influence is clearly visible.

“My all-time favorite comic book artist is the legendary Jack Kirby,” says Diaz. “He drew for Marvel and did many of their most famous characters like The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk and Captain America. Kirby’s use of the human figure was always dynamic. Maybe it was not too accurate as far as human musculature and poses, but I think that’s what I loved about him. He didn’t care, he just went for it and his art always felt spontaneous. His sense of visual storytelling from comic panel to comic panel was always exciting, very cinematic. He would also have characters break away from boxes; he just knew how make them appear like they were coming right at you.”

Mark Montgomery, senior art director, IEEE Spectrum, “grew up on Marvel comics in the mid to late 1960s, digesting the incredible illustrations of Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, John Buscema and the wonderful typography of Art Simek, a hugely unsung typographer and designer, perhaps the best in the history of comics. Comics such as the Fantastic Four, Thor, Silver Surfer and Dr. Strange were the reason I went into magazine art direction. Their dynamic poster-like covers, great interior layouts, compelling stories and imaginative type design still inspire me and stand out as great examples of publication design.”

A confession here: I, too, collected DC and Archie comix, Classics Illustrated comics and Mad magazines as a kid, even creating a basement “lending library” for my neighborhood friends. When I grew up and became an art director, a friend said he could always tell my work because “things were always popping through boxes” … no doubt my unwitting homage to early comix influences.

Countless others have their own “Strange Tales” of comix obsession—clearly, graphic designers owe a special debt to comix because they have taught us how to do our jobs, how to reach out and grab people by the lapels. As Masters of American Comics exhibition cocurator John Carlin writes in his catalog essay, “The history of comics is about many things—stories, gags, characters and layouts. But in the end, it all boils down to inventive ways to design pictures and words to engage readers and make them pay attention.”

TOP: GREEN LANTERN #41, DEC. 1964, BY GIL KANE (PENCILS) AND MURPHY ANDERSON (INKS), © DC COMICS; FANTASTIC FOUR #50, MAY 1966, BY JACK KIRBY, © MARVEL COMICS; IRON MAN #1, MAY 1968, BY GENE COLAN (PENCILS) AND FRANK GIACOIA (INKS), © MARVEL COMICS.