Boy, you don't like anybody, do you?

Allen is the original caustic dick-head-- one part guy from the Monty Python argument sketch, who simply contradicts whatever the other guy says and four parts obnoxious troll.

Mr. Socko put it best: He says what he wants, and he's all in your face about it, and that's hella extreme. He's all hardcore and shit.

So you are stating, for the record, that John Byrne is not one of your major influences?

Nope, I was just pissed off and more concerned with trying to argue with you than paying attention to what I was typing, and meandered off on a tangent somewhere and said shit I would have I known full well was wrong if I had been paying attention.

While I don't claim to be the original, I certainly have been at it a while.

Don't surf angry.

But to answer the original question: it really depends what you want from an inker. If you want one to enhance what the artist does-- there are a number of guys who do that very well and I'd put Mike Royer, Tom Palmer, Dick Giordano, Al Williamson and Terry Austin on that list.

If you want an artist who uses the basic forms and takes it in a different direction I'd put Kevin Nowlan, Bill Sienkiewicz, Wally Wood, Klaus Janson and Joe Sinnott.

Now--some of the heavy handed guys could back way off when they chose to and really let the pencillers shine through. A couple years back Nowlan inked a job started by Gil Kane and finished by John Buscema and there was no doubt where one artist stopped and the next started. Klaus too can be incredibly faithful or pretty heavy-handed. Joe Sinnott was pretty faithful to Jack Kirby--at times--but could be pretty heavy on others. Over Walt Simonson--you'd hardly know Walter had touched the page (although to be fair--those were layouts--not full pencils).

I like to look at the work of Alfredo Alcala, Barry Windsor Smith, Rudy Nebres and John Severin but I wouldn't put them in a top five--they have great lines but a limited range of textures. Still nice to look at but not especially adaptable to different pencillers.

He was an influence--but not a major one.

What you said was, Erik learned to draw by tracing Byrne comics. I've got no idea how Erik learned to draw, but it doesn't look to me like it came from tracing Byrne. Just from reading some of Erik's stuff, I'd guess that he was influenced by a lot of artists from the 1960s through the 1980s, from Kirby and Gil Kane to Byrne and Walt Simonson -- and probably to a degree by some of his Image co-founders in the 1990s, too. But his art just isn't that close to Byrne's.

Hahaha. I guess it's true that one is not an adequate judge of one's own work.