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Sep 2019

A dream that created a short story I wrote in High School. Then I sat on that short story in the back of my mind for three years before finally deciding I liked it enough to make it a real story, and here we are!

I was bored driving frequently on the same flatest, straightest, most utterly monotonous highway, so I started singing stories to myself to avoid falling asleep. It worked well! No car accidents and a comic!

To be simple, It was partly due to my first comic. I received really harsh criticism on it or the pacing and/or lack connection to the characters. So, I decided to try again with a more realistic approach but the same cute art work but entirely different story... I haven't drawn anything yet (busy with work and home life) and I'll get back to it, eventually. :frowning:

Just reading and watching so much so that I decided to start writing, lol.

  • Random dreams (and the consequential nightmares)
  • Lots of different songs
  • some TV shows or movies (esp. ones that triggered that "it could be better" type of feeling
  • old RPs
  • neglected fan characters & OCs who wound up evolving without me
  • people and animal watching :smug_01:

I've gotten specific ideas in lots of locations both ordinary and odd but I think the most frequent were places that were either highly populated (in a single space or location) or kind of abandoned. Malls, libraries, parks (the woodsy kinds), school campuses, and houses (my own and those I've visited) are the biggest 'repeat offenders' for sudden idea spawns. Liminal spaces also have their effects as well.

I was reading BL comics and realized that there is no one overweight in any of these so called BL I was reading. The guys were all perfect or suppose to be perfect. Then I thought to myself. I need a overweight character. I need him to be different, I need him to stand out. I want him to have a good personality but no one sees it because they don’t find him attractive. So my story was born.

sigh This is NOT gonna make me sound like a good person but...
There was an image of Jason Todd from Arkham Knight being strung up all beat up. This was when the Joker was torturing him and essentially corrupting him to hate batman and become evil.

...Then as I was watching this seen and poor Jason Todd, I thought...'What if I made the Joker a woman?'

...And then my sins were born and thus this story came about:

I'm definitely the type to get a lot of inspiration from the different media I consume, and then use that to fuel my story ideas :hype_01: I started out mostly doing a lot of fanfiction-type comics when I was younger, taking established universes (like pokemon or digimon) and creating my own characters to have adventures there.

Later I started writing original stories that just had a lot of shared elements from series I liked, but spun in a slightly different way (for example, the big story I worked on but never got anywhere with in middle school-college was essentially a big mash up of concepts from like Dragon Drive, Zatch Bell, +Anima (the characters even started out as +Anima OCs I was gonna use for a fan comic LOL), Megaman Battle Network, and probably some others. )

And with my current comic, I was really inspired by a few games I had played in 2017 (Has-Been Heroes and Xenoblade Chronicles 2) that had a large-ish focus on taking elemental magic and combining them to create interesting effects. I thought that concept was super cool and not something I had seen done a lot recently, so it sparked the concept for the climactic moment in my comic and then I leapt from there into developing the rest of the plot and what could get me to that cool moment I envisioned :sip:

In most cases it was seeing other people's work and me going "I want to do this MY WAY."
I'm a selfish ass I know.

But in Erie Waters' case, there was a call for submissions to a queer paranormal romance anthology. I pitched my idea but wasn't accepted. I decided to make it anyway. Probably one of my favorite works to date, it even spawned a little spin-off companion one-shot~

My biggest inspiration are music, legends and sacred art...saints sculptures ( specially the ones who look beat up) scare the hell out of me but they are so beautiful that I can't help keep watching.

Now that I remember, one of my characters is inspired by the angel by Francisco Salzillo. It changed the way I draw and sculpt. Yeah, that sculptures single handedly changed my beauty standards. :heart_eyes:

I was into anime and heart shape faces until I studied the work of this artist. My comic looks like a basic manga but my other work shows the difference. :sweat_smile:

It came from my absolute hate for straight love triangles where the two LIs fight for the affection of the main girl. I-I really hate those. So I thought, "okay so what if love triangle but the two LIs end up together"

The plot of my comic evolved so much from this to the point that the love triangle business is just... nonexistent in the actual story.

Mine is a bit complicated one. But I think I can try and boil it down to three sources.
1. I had a dream with a story that grabbed me very much, and that story took place in a summer camp.
2. Few days after that we rewatched a few episodes of Gravity Falls and I reminded myself, that if we try doing a comic, we can try doing a short story of the week take on it to make it easier and compact.
3. The catchphrase from a slasher movie "S.S.D." that draws heavily on Russian scary stories for children. The catchphrase is about the only true scary story in the movie, and speaks about a demon called Horse-head, and it goes like: "You saw him? That means he liked you." It never quite let me go...

So that is how started working on a story about a boy who meets an eldritch entity during his time in a summer camp. And so it goes on

Both of my comics were actually inspired by prompts. Our Universe started as a writing prompt piece that turned into a comic, and My Demon Valentine was a submission for a Valentine's Day contest.

But as time went on, I slowly realized that these stories came from my need to see more wholesome paranormal romances.

I have a ding in my head when I realize I was wasting time doing something unoriginal and man up myself to make my own content, so there's that.

Mean Boys was inspired by a manga I read back in 2016 where I really adored the two main characters' dynamic and still ship them to the moon and back, but since it's a sports manga of course they're gonna stay platonic. So I think it was a mixture of "I want to create a dynamic like that between my leads" and my long-running, but ever shape-shifting idea of "sports manga but canon gay couples." Except then things happened, and stuff happened, and the leads' dynamic ended up only superficially similar to what I was once going for but way more interesting for it. It truly feels like my story now, and I can't wait to tell it in full!