Let's Discuss: Inspiration

[Trapp]

This one goes out to the Comrade @SovietTiger. It's not easy to fully explain what inspires a piece of art or a narrative story. As it is, telling a story is all about expressing something, or finding an outlet for something that makes you feel a certain way. So, for all you creators, comics or not: What inspires you?

I replied to the Comrade's comment about this from a blog I posted on my birthday, and in a sense, I think that EVERYTHING can be inspiring. Something superficial, something deep and dark. I suppose what I'm trying to go with is, not specifically what inspires a full series or a character design. Which is also valid. I mean, things you probably take for granted. Things that, minimal as they can be, they have a massive impact on you, and you want to let out how it made you feel.

I'll start with a special moment from CNC Baby 2. There's a scene in the middle of the comic where Daniela Olivares (my leading lady) goes to McD's to get some food and bumps into Rassia Hernandez, her old childhood friend. Now, the fact that Rassia and Dani know each other at all came from @SovietTiger's proposal to do something with Dani. Obviously, that got me hyped up, because I'm a big fan of Rassia. And the fact that they were both Mexican made things even better because it meant that they can interact in both creators' stories. They have a past in common and they both have suffered through their share of grief. And to be fair, this was all his writing! He came up with that whole interaction himself!

So, when it came time to begin capturing for the comic, I decided to add this scene to their reencounter:

As you see, Rassía is lifting Dani off the ground the second she embraces her. The joy from seeing her childhood friend is palpable here. And you know what inspired it? My friend Blake.

He had moved to Mexico City for about four-five years at that time, and I had not seen him for a long time, physically at least. But every time he saw me, he would hug me just like this. He was a big guy and I'm not necessarily the tallest or the heaviest (debatable now, but we move). He could carry me up with his hugs so easily that it became annoying at one point. But that was the way he expressed how happy he was to see me. This screenshot was taken barely three months before he passed, and when the issue came out, it felt like an homage to him. I met him when I was 20 and he quickly became one of my best friends. He was obsessed with filming as much as I was with music at the time, and he would go on to direct several short films, and would helm a big budget project that sadly got canned. But I will always remember our impromptu jam sessions at his house, filming local shows and random videos, acting like idiots and just being goofballs. But those hugs alone... That's when you know someone really cares about you.

So, while @SovietTiger handled the writing for their whole interaction, I handled the visuals at McD's. And there you go. Just a fragment of what inspires me on certain scenes. Make sure to share your sources of inspiration below.

Edited May 11 by Trapp
Typos

[Morius]

Sorry to nose, but if you posted in public, that means I can throw my 2 cents too.

Like you said, everything can be inspiring.

But what really inspire me on creating stories, if we can call what I do here that way, is creating stories to my RPG games. 

Sorry guys, you read I talking about RPG a lot of times, I play this thing for  30 years! My goodness, the 30th year is now in June! Going to throw a party. 

Back on track, this game molded my life. I know, I don't play it in a healthy way, and I can now state it's not just a hobbie for me. 

To write these RPG stories, I take inspiration in lots of things. Recently I created Maxine Radges, my character in this new Beat 'em up RPG. So, I researched about the Jews living in Eastern Russia, Orthodox Jews, the Chukchi, Russian immigrations to america, the pro-palestine protests, far-right factions in America, etc - also, I studied how to mix and match objects on blender and custom texturizing on it. All because of my new RPG character. 

So, my main inspiration are these games which allow me to vent out my ideas on a piece of paper, a gathering of friends and free flown imagination. Before this community, The Klub was just a tool to create my characters and the characters of my friends, pose them and draw them. After this community it became another hub for me to sharing what I love. 

A porn game, who would imagine? 

I don't know if I answered, if I don't, this thread will not vanish and I can try again. 

 

[Trapp]

That actually sounds fantastic! I can't even begin to count the rabbit holes I went down to just to try and make sense of the shit I've written over the years!

Taking for example VG Elf: A lot of the fictional references there come from Lord Of The Rings, obviously. However, I threw in a couple of references that DND players will get, as well as an obscure reference to Chrono Cross, one of my personal favorite RPGs.

The characters of Gravure Love are a different story, excluding Sayaka and Emi. Years ago I was trying to write a story called DreamCatcher in which I intended to create a digital world for people to live inside of. I used a lot of the characters I created from my roleplaying days for that story, and that includes Hikaru, Marina, Nina and the previous version of Negi. I ended up researching things like transhumanism, international politics, even the MK Ultra project! That version of Hikaru was a few years younger in that project, but I decided to age him up for GL.

I think it's safe to say that part of the creator's job is to research, A LOT. And even then, I don't think the writing was up to par with how I originally intended. I took references from all over the place for that: Saint Seiya, GANTZ, Metal Gear, even Mega Man. It was fun to write for that when I had the time.

[Oz70NYC]

Inspiration for me comes from sooooooooooooo many areas; life experience, an interaction with someone, a place I've been, media I've consumed. etc. But if I had to define the main source it'd be my own, overactive, often times intrusive mind. It goes without sayin' ya' boy Oz has lived an interesting life. Grew up in the South Bronx during the 90s, served in the military the majority of the 2000s. Spent time on 6 of the 7 continents of the world and have seen a LOT with these brown eyes...good and bad. I've seen humanity at it's absolute best and it's deplorable worse. I've had experiences I wish I could share with the world, and experiences I wouldn't wish another soul to ever have to relive. And it all manifests itself in my content.

I've always been a story teller. Since as far back as I can remember. When I was youth, I wanted to be a comic maker. I was actually quite a good artist. But then I went and got a girl pregnant at 18, and enlisted in the Marines a year later because a high school diploma wasn't going to get me where I needed to be in life, and I'm wasn't the college going type. But my creativity never died. It manifested itself in other ways. The most notable ways were short stories I would write while not on deployment. As some of you may know, I've very big on professional wrestling. I ran my own pro-wrestling forum for a few years after I EAS'd from the corps. A friend of mine knew about my writing, and was a booker for a local wrestling promotion here in the New York City area, so he asked me if I'd be willing to write for them for some extra cash. I of course accepted, and had a blast doing so. During this time I also partook in what was called "E-Feds" (Electronic Federations)...basically fictional wrestling federations where all content is role played. Accept for the feds I partook in, we'd use the WWE2K series of games to create original characters and roleplay them. These games also served as one of the biggest outlets for my creative itch for many years. Below are some of my characters from the last game, WWE2K23:

I'd always contemplated using TK17 to make comics since as far back as the heyday of MG. I forget the user, but both him and @ArtsAndCrafty created very well produced and thought out comics that barely got recognition because...

1. Trying to find anything outside of the main page was lesson in futility

2. If it didn't have overt frontal nudity it hardly ever got noticed...let alone recognized.

They both inspired me even way back then, but I didn't actually pull the trigger on trying it until 2020 when we opened KE. The rest is of course history. My 3 main series The Love We Live, Stiel Maiden and Bubblee & Victoria all cover the 3 main medians of content I personally enjoy. TLWL is essentially like your classic drama/slice of life anime, Stiel Maiden is an action/thriller story based heavily on the Tom Clancy style of storytelling, and B&V is a tongue & cheek free for all that crosses over being comedy, pure porn, sci-fi, fantasy and whatever else I can cram into it. Then of course there's Magnum Opus (which I will be getting to soon) which is technically my oldest story, as I actually brain stormed the baseline plot my last year in the service, and actually "tried" to get started on MG as a story called "Reign: Fist Of Justice"...which I only made like 8 pages for before getting side tracked by other shit. So yea, creatively I'm all over the place...lol. If I had the time, patience and money to invest...I'd probably be doing all of my comics in Daz...but that shit is time consuming AND costly. So TK17 is where my creative flag is planted until I decide I'm done as a whole.

OH YEA!!! I also was HEAVY into The Sims 2 and 3 for content between 2013 to 2016 alongside TK17...But I lost almost all of my Sims stuff to a HDD crash, and ended up sticking with TK17 full time.

[Trapp]

15 minutes ago, Oz70NYC said:

Inspiration for me comes from sooooooooooooo many areas; life experience, an interaction with someone, a place I've been, media I've consumed. etc. But if I had to define the main source it'd be my own, overactive, often times intrusive mind. It goes without sayin' ya' boy Oz has lived an interesting life. Grew up in the South Bronx during the 90s, served in the military the majority of the 2000s. Spent time on 6 of the 7 continents of the world and have seen a LOT with these brown eyes...good and bad. I've seen humanity at it's absolute best and it's deplorable worse. I've had experiences I wish I could share with the world, and experiences I wouldn't wish another soul to ever have to relive. And it all manifests itself in my content.

I've always been a story teller. Since as far back as I can remember. When I was youth, I wanted to be a comic maker. I was actually quite a good artist. But then I went and got a girl pregnant at 18, and enlisted in the Marines a year later because a high school diploma wasn't going to get me where I needed to be in life, and I'm wasn't the college going type. But my creativity never died. It manifested itself in other ways. The most notable ways were short stories I would write while not on deployment. As some of you may know, I've very big on professional wrestling. I ran my own pro-wrestling forum for a few years after I EAS'd from the corps. A friend of mine knew about my writing, and was a booker for a local wrestling promotion here in the New York City area, so he asked me if I'd be willing to write for them for some extra cash. I of course accepted, and had a blast doing so. During this time I also partook in what was called "E-Feds" (Electronic Federations)...basically fictional wrestling federations where all content is role played. Accept for the feds I partook in, we'd use the WWE2K series of games to create original characters and roleplay them. These games also served as one of the biggest outlets for my creative itch for many years. Below are some of my characters from the last game, WWE2K23:

That's a very eventful life you've lived! And yes, life is all about the good and bad. Those designs you made for wrestling are absolutely fantastic! I don't think I started trying my hand at creating characters in a game until probably The Sims, which I didn't play too often. I think my deep dive for that was TK17, I tried it a few years before I actively got involved with the community and for the life of me, I can't recall other games that allowed such customization.

18 minutes ago, Oz70NYC said:

I'd always contemplated using TK17 to make comics since as far back as the heyday of MG. I forget the user, but both him and @ArtsAndCrafty created very well produced and thought out comics that barely got recognition because...

1. Trying to find anything outside of the main page was lesson in futility

2. If it didn't have overt frontal nudity it hardly ever got noticed...let alone recognized.

Yyyyyep. Such is the plight of the creator. It's kind of an existential crisis in itself because the attention span of people has drastically reduced. That's the problem with an "instant gratification" society and habits. You have to be very savvy to draw people's attention in anything. @ArtsAndCrafty does fantastic stuff, and his is definitely worth checking out and studying!

23 minutes ago, Oz70NYC said:

My 3 main series The Love We Live, Stiel Maiden and Bubblee & Victoria all cover the 3 main medians of content I personally enjoy. TLWL is essentially like your classic drama/slice of life anime, Stiel Maiden is an action/thriller story based heavily on the Tom Clancy style of storytelling, and B&V is a tongue & cheek free for all that crosses over being comedy, pure porn, sci-fi, fantasy and whatever else I can cram into it. Then of course there's Magnum Opus (which I will be getting to soon) which is technically my oldest story, as I actually brain stormed the baseline plot my last year in the service, and actually "tried" to get started on MG as a story called "Reign: Fist Of Justice"...which I only made like 8 pages for before getting side tracked by other shit. So yea, creatively I'm all over the place...lol. If I had the time, patience and money to invest...I'd probably be doing all of my comics in Daz...but that shit is time consuming AND costly. So TK17 is where my creative flag is planted until I decide I'm done as a whole.

Action stuff is very difficult to make with TK17. Ambitious projects like Stiel Maiden are very restricted due to the amount of things one can load for every "playthrough" of the game. I guess that's why it's so hard to write for certain projects. Maverick was one of those, it was hard to plan for ambush or combat scenes with such limitations, not to mention how heavy a toll loading four characters has on my laptop with the size of textures for some clothes. I definitely see how DAZ could be superior in terms of full capabilities, but I'm in the same situation as you. TK17 is definitely the only tool I can fully exploit for this type of creative endeavor. Writing around these limitations is also challenging in a sense, but at the same time, it helps to keep the clutter away when you need to.

I can't wait to see the first full issue of Magnum Opus, by the way! Gerald and Sho are very interesting characters!

[Oz70NYC]

1 hour ago, Trapp said:

I can't wait to see the first full issue of Magnum Opus, by the way! Gerald and Sho are very interesting characters!

Just a small preview of Sho's 1st introductory fight...if you could call it a fight. I can't spoil it, but there is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much behind Sho as a character to be revealed it's going to be shocking. I'll say this: his will isn't entirely his own. Revealing how is going to not only be a mindfuck, but connect dots readers never even knew existed.

Edited May 11 by Oz70NYC
Typos

[SovietTiger]

It's interesting watching others to share their sources of inspiration. And it's patent, that inspiration might lay in everything and everywhere. 

I've found the best inspiration for me, is life. I was for many years a middle ranking official in a court. I had to give the judges a report of every case that came to the court house. Many times, the "Public Ministry" (something like the D.A. Office, in freedom units) gave us such unbelievable and even fantastic stories of minor crimes and major crimes too... Many were as if they took them from fantasy novels. But, they claimed, were real.

Once, I had a crash of two women, each one in their own car. Both of them were going the wrong way in one way streets. So, under Mexican law, both had to be arrested and be brought to the judge. But, there were only minor material damages, so it wasn't really a bid deal. I knew the defender lawyers of both women and talked to them, to get to an arrangement and dismiss the case. Well, days past and nothing happened. Finally I saw one of the lawyers and asked him what happened. Were was my arrangement to dismiss the case? He replied "I'm sorry, but my client doesn't want to get to an accord". So I told the judge and we issued the arrest warrant for both doñitas. One got trow in jail and the other presented voluntarily. And I believe at the end, both got sentenced for the damages they caused to the other car. An absurd ending for a stupid Endeavor.

One other time I had a dude who was arrested as a very dangerous burglar. In Mexican law, you've got minor and major crimes. And a minor crime can be considered as a major crime, when you add qualifications to it. So, in this case, we had the minor crime "theft", and had I believe 5 qualifications, so it became a VERY serious major crime. When I studied the case, it came to my attention that none of the qualifications were truth. So at the end, because nobody could prove being the owner of the stuff "stolen", we released this dude, who was an harmless homeless guy, who took an old electric transformer case that wasn't working anymore and though he could sell it for some money to eat a couple of days.

And we had some other very disturbing cases, but those are reserved. When I was there I learned how to tell stories in a professional way, and search for the truth, if we had evidence to gain certainty of that indeed happened. So my creativity wasn't dead at the court house, but got restrained.

Also, I've got many friends who has many very interesting stories. One of my airsoft comrades told me a story, about him causing trouble in a high security prison, because when he was asked out of courtesy about something to drink, he asked for a "pineapple water". It was a maximum security prison, and the one that offered the drink was a drug lord. There was no pineapples were they were. My friend was the son of the druglord's lawyer. So, the druglord ORDERED to his little rats to GO GET PINEAPPLE WATER. After all the commotion he caused, he got his water. My friend recognizes to this day that he DOESN'T even like pineapple water, but he thought that would cause less trouble than, for example, a Coca-Cola, or a coffee, or a glass of water... Or nothing at all. Why? Only god knows.

I haven't been in a lot of places or done lots and lots of things... But definitively I know LOTS of people who have.

When I create a story, I like to make them "wholesome", as my comrade @Trapp would say. That's because I saw many many MANY stupid things that people did, in a bad day. Most of them weren't inherently bad, just had a bad idea in a bad day. And adding to that, I had a sad and lonely childhood, because of the burdens of the modern life and hardships were a couple of little children had to have the 90s TV as guardian, because both divorced parents had to be out working. And in a sad note here, I too played the sims... being very happy playing that game, creating a family. 

In my adult life and I like to read and watch funny things and love not to make people laugh, but make them chuckle and make them think "hum! That was funny!". And is very contrasting, because the thing that I love the most in all "talking" topics, is history. And we like it or not, humanity's history is divided in wars. And war is the worst that could ever happen. But even there, love can find a place: love for your comrades, love for the people that's not with you, love for the people that has to be there because they had the bad idea of being born in a conflict area...

When feeling blue, love can be painful; but it has been the only thing that has me in this existence plane, and wanting to be here anyways.

 

[Morius]

 

 

 

[Trapp]

@SovietTiger Funny that you mentioned court. I work remotely for an immigration law firm and some of the cases I do work for are GUT-WRENCHING. Just when you think you've seen the worst of humanity, there is always something that just grabs you by the hair and says "count your lucky stars, motherfucker". Of course, there's always the cases that make you roll your eyes back and wish you had a noose on your fucking neck. But I digress.

I believe the stories I write in particular mirror my perception of life and the world around me. I didn't have the easiest childhood. I suffered from bullying from elementary all the way up to high school and, let's just say my parents weren't the nicest of people sometimes. So, very much like you, I took refuge on television and videogames, and the friends I made through them, of which only two still remain through the distance.

In hindsight, the fact that I write characters such as Dani, Hannah or Tyler, is because they mirror the things I lived in a sense. And with CNC Baby in particular, I think I wrote myself into a corner because I made the mistake of Dani developing feelings for somebody, and the idea of submission out of love doesn't mirror the original idea I had for the series. But it's too late to backpedal on that. Writing love stories is very difficult for me because of how I idealized the concept of love in my youth, and how vastly different I perceive romance now. Tyler is the opposite because he mirrors some of my biggest fears as a person, but he also portrays how I wish my life had turned out with someone supportive by my side who kept me in check, instead of enabling some of my more toxic behaviors. Also, who the fuck wouldn't want a hypersexualized, loving partner?

But I agree. I like comedy. I like moments of levity. And above all, I love absurdity. The more improbable a situation seems, the more I push for it. Maybe that's a flaw on my part on account of how fucked up I am as a person, but it is what it is. But in the end, if there's no love in one's life, you might as well die. A life devoid of love is not worth living.

[Morius]

Shit, the whole text disappeared, so it just looks like some shitty images jerk-off. 

Well, I said that RPG it's not my inspiration, well, it is to some of my pictures, but RPG is to where my inspiration goes. 

And the pics are from games I played. Can you guess the characters? 

[Trapp]

6 minutes ago, Morius said:

Shit, the whole text disappeared, so it just looks like some shitty images jerk-off. 

Well, I said that RPG it's not my inspiration, well, it is to some of my pictures, but RPG is to where my inspiration goes. 

And the pics are from games I played. Can you guess the characters? 

Thank God you kept the names! But there are quite a few of them that needed no introduction! They look fantastic!