What inspired Yoshitaka Amano's style?

Amano's own answers start with American comics. In the 1960s he was exposed to Western art through comic books, and he has cited Neal Adams as his favourite comics artist, recalling that he bought used comics for Adams's covers alone. He was fascinated by the psychedelic and pop art of the West, particularly Peter Max. In a 1987 interview he added that he had known Frank Frazetta's paintings long before he recognised Frazetta's name, which will surprise nobody who has set his Guin covers beside Frazetta's paperbacks.

In the 1970s, still at Tatsunoko, he studied the Art Nouveau of the turn of the century, the Russian orientalists Leon Bakst and Ivan Bilibin, and went back to Japan's own ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The mature style is exactly that blend: Nouveau's whiplash line and decorative pattern, the flat colour fields of the woodblock, and the heroic figure he learned from comics.

The deepest ingredient may be domestic. Amano was born to a family in the traditional lacquer ware trade, and grew up around that glossy, layered craft; the shine he later chased in automotive paint on aluminium reads less like a break with his childhood than a return to it. The critic Hiroshi Unno's often-quoted verdict on the result calls his work the ultimate blending of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, American and European comics, manga and ukiyo-e.