Greetings all,

Well, I am still pecking away at a part of the game which I hope will be a funny surprise so not much to show this week. So instead I felt like doing a filler post talking about some of the comicbook influences behind the games, on the basis that games people might be less familiar with them.

Richard Sala - Alt comics artist who unfortunately died last year. I really like his work for the sense of a private, closed universe made up entirely of old pulp and horror archetypes, like a fever dream of monster movies all piling on top of each other: every store just sells creepy masks and dolls, every authority figure is a homicidal mutant engaging in inscrutable power plays against all the rest. Some of his later comics like "Delphine" have a more stripped down, dreamlike atmosphere but I have a special fondness for "Mad Night", featuring the psychotic girl detective Judy Drood. He also had a short animated feature in Liquid Television, called "Invisible Hands" which can be seen on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5sP4yRb8Mw

Mark Beyer - Another ex-RAW turned Liquid Television contributor. His comic work is amazing but I also really like the animated Thomas & Nardo shorts in which little cutout figures are mixed with blocky 3d to give the sense of a kind of nightmare extrapolation of the cutscenes from Parappa The Rapper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0DJpASAPpY

Herge - I read a lot of the Tintin comics as a kid but the ones that fascinated me most were the early ones, Tintin In America and Cigars Of The Pharoah, which had more of a hysterical pulp atmosphere: every page featured multiple death trap cliffhangers which were escaped by comedic freak accident, and some of the imagery was very dreamlike and intense. With the unfortunate caveat that since these are 1930s European comics they are sometimes as racist as you might expect.

John Stanley - the writer and artist for Little Lulu, also Melvin Monster, Dunc & Loo, 13 Going On 18 (a creepy title but good comic) and other old Dell screwball comedy titles. They have a great linguistic energy - all the stories are basically powered by resentment, spite, miscommunication, weird leaps in logic, all amped up to furious little-kid-argument levels and shooting off in all directions, sometimes quite uncanny ones. He also wrote some straight horror stories including my favourite EC-style horror comic, "The Monster Of Dread End" https://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2009/08/monster-of-dread-end.html

Jack Kirby - specifically OMAC, pure pulp id in the best sense: taking contemporary political observations or ideas and cranking them up to the most paranoid, frenzied level the better to be smashed apart by his perpetually yelling science hero. The world that's coming!! Dangerous and exciting!!

Junji Ito - I don't actually know as much horror manga as I'd like, but a few years ago I had a wonderful experience reading Ito for the first time in the form of the big Uzumaki hardcover. I enjoyed it so much that I basically fell on the path of wanting to make horror narratives from that day forward. Something I enjoyed particularly about the book was the way it was a serial narrative with the same protagonists somehow escaping death from chapter to chapter - the sense of going back and forth between a longform narrative and delirious self-contained stories, the almost comedic sense of distance of watching these characters haplessly navigate a world of increasing horror from chapter to chapter.

Well there are others but I guess I will leave them for another post where I also don't have much to show. Fare thee well for now..