Hi all. Its Jake.
Rock and I talk about inspiration a lot and we both draw from a very unique place, even before we were doing comics together.
We both love SEGA video games.
Can’t get enough of them. The nostalgic music. The 80’s and 90’s JRPG mechanics. The range of pixel art styles. The fun and simplified character designs. The story telling was so visual because it HAD to be. Games like Phantasy Star IV had cut scenes with floating panels like a sort of comic book. Others like Snatcher and Monkey Island were point-and-click adventures with fixed camera angles so the game had to frame everything for maximum impact on the player, both as an interface and as a piece of art.
Where Rock and I differ is mostly every other form of media we are inspired by (other than comics).
I find inspiration in horror and what is usually considered the driest of historical nonfiction texts. The richest inspiration coming from a mixture of the two.
I’ll explain non-fiction first. I love pouring over pages of text describing the nuances of ancient life. I recently read The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World by Chris Scarre where he details so many great things about ancient wonders you've never heard of. How about the detailed process of how the Japanese made ink 500 years ago? I’ve read that article too. Is that a National Geographic in a doctor’s office waiting room? I need to consume it RIGHT NOW.
Even when I prep for my monthly TTRPG of Heart, I ask myself how I can make this feel more real with gross minutia. To me, his kind of detail is like filigree.
I look to horror to learn how it makes the viewer/reader feel a certain way. Recently I read The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, where the simple change in perspective in the last chapter told us everything we needed to feel betrayed and recontextualize the story. That eerie feeling of violation stuck with me for a few weeks after finishing the book.
I also try to learn from my dreams. In the morning I quickly write down everything I can remember from the dream because I still feel the emotion of what I experienced. It help me understand what I can write to make someone feel a that same way.
My goal is to instill a feeling in the reader. Classical art is a rich source of inspiration to me for a similar reason. See Anguish (1880) by August Schenk for an example.
So I’ll leave you with this dream from a few weeks ago.
This dream had me looking for a gold coin with some woman. Eventually I asked her where it was and she grabbed her face by the tear ducts and stretched it out like a rubber sheet. She smiled when I saw she put the coin in her nasal cavity for safe keeping.
I asked Rock draw a picture of it.
-Jake-