What Inspired Your Comic?

[FromFinn]

Among other things.

[Jrej]

Hello @goenn,
I like the concept for your story.
I loved BLame! And I am also working of one plot inspired by that.
Using the vertical world but giving more interaction and information about different levels and outside actors.

Looking forward to what's coming next in Hero.Syn. Keep it up!

[Jrej]

Hello @ErithEl,

Thanks for taking the time to do this detailled response!
I read a lot about homeless people for research and did find that a big part of them are leaving outside because of mental illness. That's very sad...

I think it will show in my comic but I don't tackle directly. Mostly because I know very few about the topic. I focused on alcoholism and social isolation which are already huge.

Homless people is my initial plot but the story is definitely a fiction. I got some action scenes coming up at some point. So I follow what is important for the story more than actual facts...

[sarahrebecca58]

Yes in fact, this is the poetry book I'm using as a base for it: http://www.wattpad.com/story/35678457-letters-to-amelia

I'll not in the future I'm switching to one couplet per panel. Though such couplets may be longer or shorter, depending on how long I want to focus on a panel. For example the line: When we were young, we sat on the moon. That could easily be one panel in and of itself.

[eagle1]

The Shadow War was inspired by several things. The first was that I was positing a real world where all of these various powers came back, after having been absent for 10K years. What would people do with powers? The next was James Bond. Wendall's not a Bond clone, but they share some DNA. Comics such as Jon Sable, Freelance, Nemesis, and The Human Target also had some influence. In the end, however, most of it comes back to what would a person who had a limited form of teleport actually do with that ability.

Eagle
(Amusing thread)

[MaiStarberries]

While Mai Everyday Life is really just a collection of stuff that happens in my life, I guess I could say it's inspired by all of the slice of life style comics I've read over the years? But really, my work-in-progress comic is the main thing I have going that has noteworthy inspiration behind it. Mostly the idea for it comes from Scooby Doo and any "monster of the week" format anime I watched as a kid. Especially magical girl shows. In the name of the moon, I draw art.

I just always liked that format, every episode you get to introduce a new villain/monster and have the good guys fight it, then you argue with your friends over which of the monsters in the series is the coolest and which hero is your favorite. Plus it makes it all the more special when a villain or monster returns in a later episode instead of or despite being defeated beforehand.

And then honestly I did a lot of planning for this comic while my boyfriend and I marathoned the Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated series last summer. Pretty good series. Velma was kind of a jerk, but the series gave me lots of ideas, so yeah.

[ErithEl]

@goenn Ooh, yeah. The language thing came up for me as well (I'm glad someone else is thinking about things like this when writing comics!). The tricky part is finding a good, realistic way of explaining how the characters can communicate because a comic where no one understands each other would just be frustrating to read and write! Ha ha!

@FromFinn Well...that's a pretty good starting point I would say!

@Jrej Alcoholism and social isolation are definitely a big part of it as well, and a good thing to address in any story.

So I follow what is important for the story more than actual facts...

This is great - and I think the whole point of any inspiration: You take an idea, a situation, a thought, or a feeling and you make it into something all your own. As long as it's believable in the world of your story, then the literal facts don't really matter. In my opinion, at least!

@sarahrebecca58 Thanks for the link, I'll make sure to check it out! And yeah, breaking down any prose into panels can be a tough decision, but for poetry you really get to decide which lines you want to accentuate (like the example you gave!).

@eagle1 Wow, sounds really interesting! Very cool character design, from the cover, too.

@puellaaquae The good thing about any slice-of-life comics like that is no matter how many you read, they never get old because it's different for every one since the inspiration comes from the creator's personal experiences. As for the other WIP comic, all I can think of is...how cool it will be to come up with all those different monsters?!

[MaiStarberries]

@ErithEl Haha, exactly. Thinking up so many monsters is sooo coool. xD

[raymundnell]

For my webcomic No One Else Knows, I have a lot of inspiration because its a series of one-shot short-stories. In the first episode, the loner thingy was inspired by my depression seizure. Hahah, then the other episodes are inspired by the animes I watch like(twincest, harem shows). But I was really fascinated by drama stories since AnoHana and Nagi no Asukara. XD Though, I only focus straight on the main situation.

And honestly, the one-shot thingy was inspired by the famous tapastic Horror series Nothing Here by sh.liu. Hi there @sh_liu! peace V When I was ready to give up on webcomics, I read Nothing Here and was very impressed by the story telling style and I thought that maybe I could also make a series one-shot stories(but mine is drama) since I'm bad at committing myself on writing one story for a long time.

[sh_liu]

@raymundnell Omg That's awesome! I feel really honored (i'm blushing)!
I definitely agree that it's hard to commit on a long story. I suggest you read manga by Nakayama Masaaki. His stories are all very short. His work and Junji Ito's are a big part of my inspiration. I also watch a crap load of horror movies...creepypasta helps too.
Thanks again for saying that. This is what keeps me wanting to draw more =)

[raymundnell]

Youre very welcome! XD I thought youre gonna be like "he's mimicking me" but youre so kind! XD Hahah, And Yeah, I have read Uzumaki/Spiral! XD I really like the amazing creepiness, just like your webcomic! I really like to make horror stories but my style wouldn't let me. Hahah,

So, keep up the good work! And make Nothing Here the best horror webcomic here on tapastic! XD

[sirstephenkelly]

It's a loaded question, but revenge would be the main inspiration if I had to narrow it down to just one thing.

[StrangeVision]

Um Miami Vice...which I started watching after I played Vice City. Mix that with the old Dick Tracy comics I used to read and my love for Frank Miller's work in the 80s, Hideo Kojima, Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen Bros. Have yet to post it though, still marinating!

[ponytaponyboy]

Is it too late to answer this? My comic, The Incompetent Lover (Ponyta), is based on my parents and all the family members always asking me: "when are you getting a boyfriend?" or "When are you getting married?". So basically, my comic is a response to their question.

[bmacbride]

I think what inspired the original idea that was recycled and remodeled over and over until it became MM was... Kuroshitsuji? Which is really ironic and dumb, because I hate Kuroshitsuji and I always have. But yeah, Memento Mori didn't have a name until relatively recently, and when I first conceived of it, it was about undead zombie hit-men in Victorian England, complete with loli-goth steampunk pseudo-Victorian designs and themes (I hate steampunk too, idk what I was thinking or what was the matter with me.)

Then it was pushed to the backburner for a few years until I needed a vent project to shove all of my more unsavory interests onto... and that's how it got off the backburner... and then somehow I started to take it more seriously and turn it into something other than a junkyard for my guilty pleasures. Or rather, something in addition to a junkyard for my guilty pleasures?

[fighterxaos]

What inspired Mixtape were the conversations with my friends in high school and how I was dubbed the "king of random" for being well, extremely spontaneous and saying and doing very trippy stuff. So I decided to make a comic based off of that in high school and it eventually evolced into what it is today.

My upcoming webcomic "New Courage" were inspired by two things. One is my own family and how it came to be and the other was a track I heard by a beat producer named Odin Smith that gave me the idea to turn that into a story for a fighting game. I've decided to now take that fighting game's story and turn it into a webcomic since, y'know I don't know how to make games

[FromFinn]

Yeah those colours and visuals inspired me too.

[azyzl]

What inspired Crystal Ball is a Keane song of the same name. There is a line in it that goes "I lost my heart, I buried it too deep/Under the Iron Sea". That had me thinking about what if you could actually hide away your heart? What would the implications of it? Why would someone choose to do that?

I sat on the idea for a few years, until I hammered out a rough storyline that eventually became Crystal Ball.

[r0ckrabbi7]

In 2006 I had a little sketchbook and just drew random girls with crazy outfits and animal parts.. There were about 7 or 8 of them. For some reason I decided that they fit in the same universe and it just went from there... I gave them names and began drawing them over and over again. Eventually the designs changed (some less, some - quite a lot), the characters became more human.. I began working on backstories for the girls...those changed here and there as well... I guess at some point I realized I have managed to develop the universe enough to wish to tell those characters' stories.
And that's how Three Wishes came to be! (:
There are still some things I wish I dropped off... but it's things I kept through all of these years of "story development" and even if they're bad, I guess I want them to be there.. I mean, they've stuck to the characters for so long.. it kind of feels like a scarlet letter that I shouldn't hide.

[joannekwan]

Ahaha, I had been seeing a lot of demons on tumblr so I go about sketching some of my own, and I thought, "hey, these guys look pretty cool, maybe I'll put them in one of my stories." Then one day I was on a commuter train going into the city and I passed a bunch of old rickety looking homes and thought, "what if these demons haunted a house like this and some poor unsuspecting human moved in and had to deal with them?" Thus the basic idea for Demon House was born.