RIGBY – An Epic Webcomic by Lee Leslie

There’s this fun little meme going ’round where you plug in all the different artists or properties you’ve spent your whole life stealing from so everyone can take a peak at your influences are (except they already know, because they’re your influences, and it’s sort of obvious, duh). Below you’ll find mine. I focused strictly on artists, because considering everything was a bit overwhelming. You can click through to get a closer look.

Bill Watterson is an easy number one for me. He is my cartooning alpha and omega. He ignited my love for the medium, and is still the unobtainable peak to which I strive. Mike Mignola and Bruce Timm are a pretty easy (and interchangeable) two and three.  Man, I really steal the crap out of those guys.

A couple dudes on there you might not know are Thomas Hart Benton and Hector Casanova. Benton was an early 20th Century painter that nobody pays much attention to anymore, but I’ve loved his stuff since I was a kid. There’s such a rich fluidity in each of his figures, and they way it all flows into the backgrounds, beautiful.  And Hector Casanova  is the shit, for reals. He’s done two commercially released comic book series (Screamland with Harold Sipe and The Lurkers with Steve Niles) as well as an amazing comic strip called Guffman and Godot (which used to be viewable on his website, you should ask him where it went). Also, I was lucky enough to work for him when I was in high school and he told me a lot of great things that I still think about when I sit down to draw.

As promised here’s a couple of tangentially RiGBY related photos from our recent family excursion westward. South Dakota was our destination and the open road our companion. We were careful when fording rivers and kept lemons in constant supply to ward of scurvy.  All encounters with the natives could be described as peaceful, especially that cool South Dakota State Trooper who let me go with a warning.

After checking out the falls at the Sioux River, my special lady friend made the pilgrimage to De Smet to light a candle for her favorite author, Laura Ingalls Wilder. We pressed on to Mitchell an checked out a prehistoric Indian village after giving a cursory glance to the elegantly named Corn Palace. At the Indian village a structure known as  ”The Archeodome” has been erected, which sounds a bit like Indiana Jones and Laura Croft might go 12 rounds inside, but is actually a really cool working archeological dig site and laboratory. You can check out two my favorite junior Rigby’s honing their archeology skills in a sand box loaded with bison bones and arrowheads.

We soon found ourselves wandering the unforgiving terrain of the badlands before pressing ever westward toward Rapid City. I hear tell there’s a couple big sculptures of some famous dudes up on one of the mountains in Rapid City, but we skipped that as both the misses and myself had already had several previous encounters with this attraction. The highlight of the trip for my littlest lady was a cement dinosaur park built in 1936.

The main attraction for me was the museum operated by The Black Hills Institute of Geologic Research.  This place is dinosaur crack, pure and concentrated. Every square inch of the museum is packed with fossils, footprints, statues, minerals and gems. The Black Hills Institute is fairly well known to dinosaur nuts like myself as the discoverers of Sue and Stan, the two most complete Tyrannosauruses yet unearthed, but what really wowed me at the museum was a mummified Edmontosaurus. It was a rare thrill to see such well preserved dinosaur skin up close.

One final attraction for your consideration: Carhenge. For real.

Change of plans for next week’s updates. Since I’ll be out of town we’ll be running some guest content on the site, and then we’ll start up chapter 3 when I’m back and can properly enjoy it.