Roberts argues that strips such as Apartment 3-G "can trace their origins to the success of Raymond's strip". Although his work was rarely seen outside of the newspaper "funny pages", as Raymond preferred to focus his energies on strip work, he also produced a number of "illustrations for Blue Book, Look, Collier's and Cosmopolitan" as well as Esquire. The "heightened realism" of Raymond's photorealistic style has been "chastised for making his pictures too realistic, too gorgeous for its own sake", although many commentators believe that this very method "plunges the reader into the story". Raymond's work has a "timeless appeal," many aspects of which—including the use of feathering (a shading technique in which a soft series of parallel lines helps to suggest the contour of an object)—have inspired generations of cartoonists, his work becoming "the raw material for the swipe files of future generations". His work on Rip Kirby is especially noted for its use of "sophisticated black spotting", a technique Raymond used from c.1949 "for pacing" reasons. Fellow-cartoonist Stan Drake recalled that Raymond called his black areas "pools of quiet", serving as they did "as a pause for the viewer, something to slow the eye across the strip's panels". Specific influences Alex Raymond's "influence on other cartoonists was considerable during his lifetime and did not diminish after his death". George Lucas has cited Raymond's Flash Gordon as a major influence on his Star Wars films (which, cyclically, inspired the 1980 Flash Gordon film), while Raymond's long shadow has fallen across the comics industry ever since his work saw print. Comics artists who have cited Raymond as a particularly significant influence on their work include Murphy Anderson, Jim Aparo, Matt Baker, Frank Brunner, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Dick Dillin, Lou Fine, José Luis García-López, Frank Giacoia, Bob Haney, Jack Katz, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Joe Kubert, Russ Manning, Mort Meskin, Sheldon Moldoff, Luis Garcia Mozos, Joe Orlando, Mac Raboy, John Romita Jr., Kurt Schaffenberger, Joe Sinnott, Dick Sprang and Alex Toth, among many others. In particular, Raymond has been named as a key influence by many of the most influential and important comic book artists of all time. EC Comics-staple Al Williamson cites Raymond as a major influence, and is quoted as saying that Raymond was "the reason I became an artist". Indeed, Williamson ultimately assisted on the Flash Gordon strips in the mid-1950s, and Rip Kirby in the mid-1960s (all