What inspired you to write and create your comic/story?

[SWestComics]

Like for me, I've never been a fan of more modern horror because it seems to really focus on gore and some really messed up stuff happening to the main cast. However, I was watching some older horror movies, and with technical limitations of the time, the bad guy or monster or whatever isn't seen super often and so the suspense mostly comes from the unknown. I thought it was such a cool concept that I had never really thought of much that it lead me to write my comic with the idea of having something hidden from both the cast and the reader which is only slowly shown as the story goes on.

[Penni]

For my current story,

my Netflix queue

[CarltonIsaac]

All the printed comic books and paperback/hardcover books I enjoyed reading over the years, and Heavy Metal Music XD

[ApplesOverIndia]

There was a semester in college where my entire life just turned upside down. Every day I woke up and felt like I had no idea what would happen by the time I went back to bed, and wildly unreasonable and unexpected things just kept happening. I loved that semester and wanted to capture that feeling of freedom and uncertainty and like I was running into the unknown just by existing. One of the weird turns life took was a couple friends inviting me to do NaNoWriMo with them, so I said why not (despite having barely written anything in years), spent a couple weeks developing characters and outlining, and cranked out a novel in a month that captured the feeling I wanted to bottle. After editing and whatnot, here it is. It's by no means based on the actual events in my life that semester, but it takes that feeling and wraps it up in an old car and hair dye, skinny dipping and roller coasters, and running away from life with a stranger.

I go back to it whenever I want to return to that feeling, and I wanted to share it with the world in case someone else wants the same thing. So here we are.

Life in Polaroids | Tapas

[Pony_wearing_a_hat]

The most interesting inspiration is when I heard about the director of Annihilation getting some backlash because for misrepresenting the races of characters who's races were revealed in a sequel book that hadn't come out yet when he made the movie. That situation was a huge inspiration for the first character I wrote for the story. After I came up with him the rest kind of branched out from there.

[Kura]

I want the pain I went through growing up to amount to something. I don't want to be without a voice.

[domisotto]

For my current story, I wanted to try something I don’t write (YA, werewolf) with the historic culture and genetic information that just fascinated me when I was watching a documentary about it... then I added BL layer to it.

If it sounds confusing... lol, I think that’s how I always write, through synthesis of things that caught my attention.

🤣

[peach]

I wanted to make a comic that took on some issues that are personal to me, like drug use and mental illness, and put them in a sort of slice of life kind of comic that still touches on the harder parts of life. Kind of like a coping mechanism for me, I guess

[Koneko-chan-hai]

I started thinking about my story since late middle/ early high school, I was getting curious about heterochromatic anime characters and thought there were so few of them as protagonists.
Then I wanted to do a reversal of typical post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes, such as in Fist of the North Star which is set in a nuclear desert, so i wanted my story to be set in a nuclear winter instead. I also thought about the theory that after climate change the Earth could turn into another ice age. I also wanted to take the opposite of the main character, like Kenshiro who's a strong and fearless man, while my main character Sakurako is a frail and (later on) emotional young girl.
Also the pandemic and Black Lives Matter helped set things going ngl
If you want to check it out, you can see it here!

Hetero Sakura | Tapas

[arxianfall]

• Adrenaline junkies and other junk: 16 years of skateboarding and mountainboarding.

• No Steel: Rimworld

• A Half Eaten World: Reoccurring dreams I've had since my childhood

• Chains and Cooldowns: My frustration with atrocious isekai world-building and complete asspulling

• Vanquisher: A dream about back parasites combined with a dream about a divorced doctor going back to see his childhood friends.

• A visit from Victoria: My steampunk escape room story which was itself inspired by the Dolls of Albion audio album.

But mostly intense dreams.

[queen_of_spades]

when I was a teen I decided to read the bible as a book... loved this story... wanted to make a different version...

Delilah, forever | Tapas

[Rhonder]

D&D! My current project developed from being stuck in a writing run for the other comic I was trying to create when I was invited to start a D&D campaign with some friends. I've played once before but with an entirely different group of people, and although it was fun I couldn't really get into it and it definitely didn't seem "comic-able".

This new group though had lots of humorous and fun interactions, and after several happened in the first play session I decided to make a few small skit comics highlighting the best moments. After doing a number of those and not making any headway on the writing for the other project I decided to put that one down for the time being and develop this new D&D comic into something that could be a "main project".

Now here I am, trying frantically to get ready for an early February launch- hopefully xD

[HippieGhost]

I've had The Aphuanian Tales in my head for the past twenty years, and took inspiration from not only the shows and video games I liked, but also the events of my life and the lives of those around me. Originally it was going to be a simple story about a man going on an adventure to be a hero, but as I've grown the world has grown with me, and now the story itself overall is really about Aphing itself, told through the eyes of its characters. I went with the story collection format because I wanted to show that everyone has their own story to tell, and its the culmination of those stories that lead to the bigger things in the world.

[Mallory]

Engram was inspired by my favourite childhood sci-fi, which was written in USSR and had a very distinct utopian flavor to it. The original revolution was helmed in part by idealists who wanted a future for all humankind where everyone was able to achieve their full potential (then they all got executed by Stalin, lol). After Stalin, in the 60's and 70's there was a huge resurgence of that kind of vision for the future, and a lot of the popular sci-fi stories (especially children's popular sci-fi stories) were genuinely kind and hopeful and full of characters who solved their problems through ingenuity and communication rather than violence. I LIKE writing violence, generally, so I wanted to challenge myself to do something else.

I also wanted to just tell a story about a girl and her space ship going on a small private adventure - small scale, small (from a universe's perspective) stakes, so they all kind of combined into Engram.

My other story that I'm currently working on is a polar opposite because it's all about violence, lol. It started out as a frustrated "what-if" when I was watching a tv show I do enjoy, but which features 300 characters - of which there are only 5 women, 3 of whom are just passive victims waiting to be rescued by a dude. So, I wanted to write about a woman of means and noble birth who decides she's gonna take over the galactic empire. There are SO FEW stories of this nature, and if there are, it's usually like... they're victimized and cast out and everything is so horrible and THEN they decide to take charge. I wanted a story where the woman was never victimized. She just... decided she's gonna rule the world, because she's obviously the best-suited for it. And of course it's difficult and deadly and awful, but only because she actively CHOSE to pursue this kind of life. Something more similar to a number of famous female monarchs, who schemed and maneuvered their way into power without ever going through a "rags to riches" narrative. And she partners up with her elderly father's favourite concubine (who is a MASSIVE SCHEMING JERK) to do it, who would normally be the "evil petty woman" antagonist.

Originally this story was going to have a grass-roots republican rebellion/revolution as the other faction, but then I realized that for the average Western reader, they would 100% root for the rebels if I did that, so I made the rebels socialist revolutionaries. And then I realized that I could use that window to explore my own childhood and my own ancestors' history. I'm not... HUGE on my country of birth, but I do remember how proud and emotional the people were, and I realized I could tell something there, something that's honest that I don't normally touch. Something like the story of my great-grandmother, who, until her death, would take all formal photographs in her military uniform laden heavily with medals and honors that she'd been awarded as a WWII surgeon. I hope I can do that kind of pride justice.

[crowstories]

It was a whole stupid progression tbh...

First, somebody explained Twilight to me and I was like "JFC you're kidding me"
Next I decided I could write a parody of that
Then I decided I couldn't write a parody of it because I didn't want to watch or read it, but I could write something silly and loosely inspired by it
Then I decided that it would have to be really, REALLY loosely inspired because I'm not all that interested in vampires... like there are kind of still vampires, but kind of not, because [REDACTED DUE TO SPOILERS]
Then I just threw in some other tropes like mean girls and con artists to make it more entertaining for me to write.

Who knows if the end result will be at all appealing to anybody, but some of the people who read the first incarnation of the story in its original medium seemed to think it was fun and original, so hopefully that holds true.

[carafox2121]

My stories are inspired by my love for superheroes and mythology. I thought it would be fun to make my own pantheon inspired by a mix of deities from all cultures. So, the gods in my story are somewhat of a reflection of that. Also, at first I wanted to make an original superhero and then realized that was going to be super hard! So, in the end, the hero I created was like... an homage of sorts to the type that I grew up loving: witty, smart, sarcastic, and so on.

[joannekwan]

Usually all my stories are reactions to other media I see.
Like I'll see a lot of media with X kinds of characters or themes and then I feel compelled to put my own spin on it with tropes and plot lines that I enjoy, catered exactly to me.

For example, my latest major project Secunda began with seeing a lot of monster x human pairings floating around online, but I thought all the monsters were a bit too nice and the humans were a bit too chaste. So I said to hell with that and wrote my own pairing my own way.

On the rare occasion, some stories come from real-world inspirations. We were driving to a city and the GPS took us on a different route than usual to avoid traffic. I'd never been through this new area and was awed by the scenery. It then inspired a new story idea I'm currently working on.

[HopefulAttempt]

For me it was a need for an escape from reality. My friend had been diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer that I lost her too, and that entire year was an insane mess (which is probably why my stories keep having one issue after the other appear for the mains characters ). But since then I've found such a passion for writing, and I find a lot of inspiration in songs and art.

[Eiranyx]

Most of my current writings including my web comic are inspired from my dreams -- most of the time my dreams are set in places that i've never been to yet seems familiar and its either I am the main character or the bystander watching the things that happens in that dream unfold. --- and in dreams, most of the uncommon ideas, settings or plot you don't usually think of comes to life. That's why I always write my dreams down and from there I generate a plot out of it combining with some things/elements I'm into in the waking life ^^

[Kaydreamer]

For me, it was a huge love for fantasy and sci-fi stories since childhood, be it books, film, TV or animation... I loved escaping into different worlds. (I also wanted to be an astronaut for many years as a child, so my love of the unknown goes back a LONG way.) Over time, my own fantasy universe began to coalesce, with its own lore, species, magic system, characters and so-on. I always knew I had to tell share that world and its stories somehow, at some point in my life.

I thought it would take the form of illustrated novellas because I didn't think I had the artistic chops for a graphic novel. Buuuut, now here I am with a webcomic!

As for more direct inspiration for Blue Star in particular (since it's technically a side-story for Dragonfeathers, which is its MUCH, much larger parent project) shows like Cowboy Bebop, Firefly and Star Trek Next Gen all played a part in inspiring me.

Blue Star Rebellion | Tapas