For Quackcast 54 I want to know about your creative background and how that influences your work!
What kinds
of things from your life have had an influence in your work and what you
put in your comics?
-I'm talking about every aspect, from what influenced your art style (classes at art school for example), to how you came up with your writing technique, to the fact that you have a supporting character based on your friend Dave and you have your characters eating apples because YOU love apples, you have a Cutlass Supreme in your comic because it was your first car, you lead character always wears red because you fricken LOVE red, and part of your story is based on a funny thing that happened to you and your fiends on your 16th birthday…
Yeah, I want all that sort of thing! Talk about Music, Movies, stuff from real life, whatever, if it had an influence on your comic tell me about it- Tell me about how that thing changed your work! ^_^
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
QUACKCAST 54 -Creative backgrounds, under the influence.
Ooooh, very interesting topic. I could probably fill a whole quackcast by myself, talking about these things :P
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My mother is a librarian, and she used to bring me novels and comics as a kid, so I'm equally used to prose and sequential storytelling. The idea that comics can tell just as complex and mature stories as "high literature" is at the core of my understanding of comics. Animation and movies also fascinate me, and I often find myself trying to achieve a feel that is more akin to the cartoons/animes or movies I watch, than sticking to, say, the norms of what a good illustration in a comic should be.
[p]
Prime examples of that would be my trying to channel the sheer awesomeness of 2001 and the kinetics of FLCL in everything I do. Other influences are progressively added on top of that… (Holon openly pays tribute to a lot of my current influences; there's a "references" subpage on the comic site.)
[p]
I've never taken any art or creative writing courses, so everything I do is based on trial and error. I think when I first started making longer comics, my writing was quite convoluted. Any progress since then can be attributed to (1) feedback (making webcomics is obviously great for that), (2) reading more books and comics and watching more movies, studying the way they do it, and (3) refining my own inherent/"innate" techniques.
[p]
Content-wise, my comics mainly build on my frustrations with the real world, which are partly of a political/sociological nature, and are partly centered around specific persons in my life. Then I disguise that with (hopefully) interesting visuals and some philosophical meta-topics.
[p]
One popular misconception about me is that since I'm an artist, I have to be a good observer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I don't care about a lot of things in real life, and I just don't look at things that aren't interesting to me. I don't make art for art's sake, where I see something and it just strikes me and I need to put it on paper. That's not the way I work. I'm all about ideas, relationships, intangible things which are rarely ever associated with clear visuals, and the visuals in my comics are just my best approximation of my ideas… I guess the only real-life object in which the raw immaterial idea and the actual visual coincide is an attractive woman. That's why my comics always have those at their center! :P
Damn OZ, this QC will be cake for you. The contributions and recordings from us alone will easily fill up the timeslot. You might not have to do anything!
I'll probably record something. It'll be short though, because the creative background of my comic is pretty simple.
This is a big broad topic, I could discuss so many things and I have no idea what will be most interesting. Rather than record something I'm just gonna type this up here.
Art wise i've enjoyed drawing since a wee baby and whatever I saw inspired me, be it insects, people animals or things on TV. If I like something or get into anything I have to draw it. I'm fairly easily inspired so the trick for me is not to let things inspire me too directly. I've been into role playing since I was a kid and the art in the books always inspired me, just as much as the writing and settings of the games did. I used to pour over the art of things like the D&D monster manual and the covers of the fighting fantasy books.
Movie and videogame posters as well. Sometimes that art style of computer games too. 
It was usually more to do with the way the images inspired my imagination rather than the technical proficiency. Although that never hurt.
Movie wise it was the like sof starwars, terminator, robocop, aliens, willow, hawk the slayer, conan and so on and so forth. Growing up in the 80s was great.
All the while i read comics, mostly things like 2000AD at that point, a few british reprints of marvel comics but mostly 2000AD. Oh and old war comics, commando and the like.
Actually this song sums up a lot of my inspiration from the 80s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txirj1vX_Ck
Then came games consoles, anime and all that.
Akira, street fighter 2, mortal kombat… therise in popularity of manga and anime. I expect a lot of people had something similar so i won't go in depth with that.
For sci fi shows like Babylon 5 and red dwarf were certainly an infulence, especially with BASO
People inspire my characters, so if anyone says my characters are cliched or unrealistic… well they are based on real people… even if my writing fails to live up to that.
Dan from Malefic was inspired by a customer from a game shop I used to manage. This short ginger guy used to come in and talk at length about final fantasy and how cloud strife had a BIG FUCKOFF SWORD!!! and not pick up on the fact that no one was interested. He was so into the games and clearly lacked the social skills to actually have a proper conversation… Anyway Dan was inspired by him and was meant to die early on but I grew attached to the character.
I mentioned role playing, that was my main creative outlet for a long time and has sopme parrallels with comicking, at least for me as I was usually the DM/GM/storyteller however I did find that role playing adventures aren't so easy to xonvert into comics when I did Equivocate.
Other things….
I did some amateur film making which helped with making comics, soemthings carry over from camera work to drawing comic panels. Shame I never finished and of the projects, too hard without paying people to do…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGcuuVQGgas&feature=related
and another that is a mixture of test footage for a couple of horror comedy shorts I planned but never managed to do properly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzlW11sdOMI&feature=related
I've never done any writing courses and art wise… self taught which is probably why I'm not that good.
yes - huge and interesting topic.
maybe I'll record something - but in case I don't, I know for a
fact that my first drawings (and I've saved a few from kindergarden) were of
people. Characters were my first interest, and I haven't changed much
from that other than having characters in certain situations. Generally,
the situations are mundane, often ironic. Sometimes they domino into a
fantasy.
And I have had a lifelong respect (? is that the word? maybe
hunger) for illustration, particularly children's illustrators: Rackham,
Pyle, Wyeth(s), Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Kay
Nielson – oofa, and the contemporaries!! jaybus, it goes on and
on.
But as much as I love art, the art is not the stay. It's the
writing that draws and keeps me. If the storytelling isn't there - well,
I just may not come back to a piece. And I don't have anyone to point
at as an example – no pinnacle. It's like obscenity, I know good
writing when I see (read) it.
For my stuff, I don't have hang-ups about the writing. No doubt
it can be improved, but I've generally been able to express myself in words so
much more aptly than I have in art. What I'm working on (and It will be
ongoing for an unforseeable future) is to find my own style, without aping
someone else.
I can't say that my comic's style wasn't heavily influenced by manga, cuz then I'd be lying, i used to read all sorts of manga and webcomics of all sorts, either bad or good or whatever. And i just grabbed little bits and pieces from that and turned it into comics.
My writing style isn't really something i think about, i just think of "how can i make this aspect of bartending interesting?" (since that's kind of the premise of my comic), I just try to make something so mundane actually entertaining without turning it into a pure action comic.
The story of the comic though, that started during a time when i was very depressed over a fight with a best friend (the fight lasted a year, too) and i was so depressed that i was willing to read "Bartender", a manga that's about a bartender (How'd you know?!). Back then i was super prejudiced about alcohol and all things drug related, so i thought if i read this i'd at least get what all the fuss was about….and i did. I learned hardcore, I learned of alcohol's extreme depth, complexity and cultural aspects, both the good and the bad, i started researching, buying cocktail books, and admiring the house Bar that i used to despise.
Then as my family was on vacation, my sister showed me something (i'd been doing comics for a while by then, but stopped because of the depression) in the newspaper, it said there was going to be an international wine comics competition (inspired by the super popular Manga about wine called 'Kami no Shizuku'), originally that's what the comic was going to be about, but i then learned i was too young to even partake in said competition, and i didn't know anything about wine, only the super basics, so i decided to make it about bartending instead, i wasn't about to give them the character rights, too. And that's how my comic was born.
As for the protagonist's name, as it used to be about wine, i wanted to the protagonist to have a name related to wine that wasn't too lame. My sister (once again) blurted out "maybe name him after that greek god of wine", i didn't know the greek one's name (dionesius) so i used the roman one's name, thus Bacchus was born.
some of the major parts of my comic are inspired off of manga as well, for example the 'cocktail battles' is something i got from another manga called "addicted to Curry" where they had "curry battles": basically just trying to make a better curry than your opponent. so i figured i could use that for my comic (and that's where i thought of the tournament). As for the style of the 'battles' I used a mix of two tropes that are heavily used in two different manga. One being the "What do you mean it's not awesome?" trope heavily used in "Death Note", where basically every mundane thing you do is totally awesome or super dramatic and meaningful like here where the man is writing down the people's names in the notebook. And the "Serious Business" trope heavily used in "The Legend of Koizumi" a manga where it feature the Pope and a super powered Hitler fighting using Mahjong as a means of determining the fate of the earth itself, but the trope is basically taking something mundane and making it so important that people risk their lives for it like an action movie. And the fusion of these two tropes is what dictates the more intense moments in my comic.
there have a been a load of suggestions from friends on what to do in my comic and really i don't pay attention to most of them because they are pretty dumb ideas most of the time but i usually incorporate some more or less.
Other than all that all i can really think of that helped inspire my comic would be all the bartending stuff i've done at home, testing out new drinks, learning about wines and drinks till exhaustion, learning the extremely complex theory of mixology and other things. I thank manga for giving me that little push.
For this one it's going to be focussed on contributions. If I had a guest it would be massively unfair to them because they'd only have a small amount of time to shine. With a guest I like as much focus to be on them as possible, I don't want to keep on cutting out to read contributions and play recordings etc. :(
So please, please record your thing! If you're worried that it'll be too long, just focuss on a couple of things that mean the most to you. Try and keep it to 2 or 3 mins max. I think those are good times?
ayesinback wrote:
PIT_FACE wrote:FEAR NOT! I GOT A NEW MICROPHONE!!!
but THIS, precisely, has been The Fear. now realized. :P
oh….
well then TREMBLE ye of inferior sonic indiscresions!!!
This one is done with now too. I've edited it up together and now I just have to do the notes and put those in as well.
OK, quackcast 55! I have to go though my topic list and see which one is best… I will have to have a guest on this week too. I will get back to you guys about a topic so you can organise contributions, if it's that sort of topic :)
Maybe something Christmas related…? Only two Quackcasts to go before Christmass…? Naw. 26 will be the Christmas one!
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