Influences on Seth: Winsor McCay

Seth gave me this delightful picture of a girl riding a jellyfish a long time ago: maybe it was when he was still living in the Oki Islands (before 1998), I don't remember exactly. I wouldn't say that he drew it on account of his knowledge of Winsor McCay, but when I found the picture by McCay below it reminded me of this one by Seth.
I have spoken here before about how much he loved the ocean and its denizens. He may have encountered jellyfish while he was diving, and pictured a pleasurable--not stinging--relationship between a girl and a really big jellyfish, something he could do in a fluid, curving, poetic, neo-Art Nouveau sort of manner.

Influences on Seth: Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay was a pioneer in the drawing of comic strips. He was, according to the things I have been reading about him, the first to set his comic stories in other than the real world, the first to use surrealism in his work, though what he himself wanted most to do was to draw beautiful pictures. His Little Nemo in Slumberland seems to have been the the first comic in which panels might change shape as an aspect of the story, so the panel shape became actually part of the artwork. This is one thing that Seth gloried in, and used especially robustly in Willworld, as you can see in this page, where Hal has come in contact with this hallucenogenic globe, and just bl0%*#>+=*~~s into never never land. This is an especially McCayish page, with Hal in his 19th century style nightshirt and nightcap (not that Little Nemo wears either one) and heading off to a sleep that is sure to have weird dreams.
There are several other aspects of Seth's art that owe something to McCay. In his style of drawing, where he didn't use shading, and not even much black, he needed some way to make the important parts of the image stand out. He did it by using heavier and lighter lines,

as McCay did. It seems to me that he did this consciously, after discovering McCay's work while he was in college. Seth's first or second multi-page booklet is a story he wrote in the style of McCay's "Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend" that starts out ordinary and grows more and more fantastic, ending with his heroine falling out of bed saying, "I knew I shouldn't have eaten that rarebit right before bed."

Also like McCay, Seth wanted particularly to draw beautiful pictures.

Influences on Seth: MC Escher

Again I am not sure "influence" is the right word for Seth's relationship with the work of MC Escher. He knew and loved Escher's work, and was interested in some of the same visual issues as Escher was. The Doom Patrol page that I have posted here shows different levels of reality, just as the beautiful Escher lithograph does.

In Seth's page we have first of all, the thing that Seth never forgot: that he was making comic books. This is not The Real World, ladies and gentlemen; it's a fantasy story. And the people on this page are not real people. So that's Level One: comic book. But on this page there is also Level Two: the giant TV screen where we see people from a more distant reality, talking to our heroes via monitor from (fantasy) France. The fact that the TV screen is slanted gives it a visual Level Three, where we see the people from France at an oblique angle.

The different levels of reality in Seth's art are less pointed than in the Escher, but the mind behind them was just as interested in visualizing concepts from Math and Physics, in playing with pen and ink on paper in order to show more than merely the progress of a story. Seth wanted to add something scientific and even spiritual to his pages to give anyone who was willing to spend time with his art an entree into depth of life beneath what is easy and obvious.

Influences on Seth: MC Escher

It may be not so much that Seth loved the work of MC Escher, but that he felt a kinship with it. Like Escher Seth was a mathematical sort of artist who loved visual puns, a complex kind of symmetry, designs that repeated,
but where the repetitions are not exactly the same.

What Escher termed Symmetry drawings like the ones posted here, Seth used as a jumping board to start thinking about the complex repetitive images that he called Tessellations.
He loved making these things. It was something that he did entirely for himself; he got very little revenue from them: a few posters sold, that's all. However, at the time of his death he was in the midst of negotiations with a fabric manufacturer to do some fabric designs. Another person wanted him to paint some ceramic tiles with a Seth Fisher repeated design. So it is possible that he would have started to do tessellation work that made him some money.

Influences on Seth: a couple more Moebius

I think Seth learned a lot from Moebius. I didn't realize how much until I started looking (recently) for Moebius pictures here on the internet. The picture at the bottom from Moebius shows a couple of effects that Seth used definitively in his work.
In the top illustration, from a Cicada magazine story, Seth has set the point of view well below the eye level of the protagonist in the picture, so that we look up to see his face and the ceiling above him with its futuristic structures. This picture, like the Moebius one below, has a very non-organic, mechanized world look, to go with the story which is set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone lives inside, never seeing the sky.

Another trick he learned--and I presume this is where he learned it--is to use details--not just dots or lines--to create grey space, in order to show depth, create visual interest, and make sense of a complex scene. In the second image, from Flash: Time Flies, Seth has put the Flash on top of a building whose architectural ribbing makes (not really rectangular) rectangles, and whose tiled floors make small squarish shapes. He has used all these things to give a sense of depth to his picture, as well as making some white space and some grey space. It's the same thing Moebius did in the picture here. If you look at the picure quickly you see white and grey spaces. If you stop to examine it, you see all the details that make the space grey.

Influences on Seth: Moebius again

I couldn't find an exact reference for this picture from Moebius' work, but from the things I can find online, this drawing from a college-age Seth seems very Moebius-esque.

In his senior year in college Seth, who, as many people know, majored in Math, not Art, was given the opportunity to have a one-man art exhibition. I flew out to Colorado Springs in January for the opening of it. It was a cold, snowy evening, and not too many people attended, but the school newspaper gave Seth a glorious review, which I will look for. The reviewer called Seth "The Fisher King" (after a movie that was popular at the time). This and yesterday's image were two of the pieces in the show. He was so pleased to have his own exhibition space, and the show looked really good, and we were so proud of him.

Influences on Seth: Moebius

This black and white drawing of Seth's, from college, is a fairly self-conscious homage to Moebius, as you can see from the actual Moebius drawing below. Seth's is not a copy, though. Seth put his own spin on the image of the lonely girl in her odd helmet. He probably didn't have Moebius' drawing in front of him. My guess it that he remembered having seen it and did his own response to it.