Strip 41: Silent as the Grave

We’ve been told that our visual style could use a little more surrealism, and we’ve been steadily moving in that direction since about strip 20. This is the first strip where I think we’ve really succeeded in incorporating surreal imagery into the comic, with the buildings of Maka jutting out like tombstones from the dust. We’re not really at an artistic level where we can realistically portray a post-apocalyptic city, so we’re better off conveying the destruction symbolically. Even if we could do the setting justice, I think I would prefer tombstone buildings anyway, because it gives our city a unique flavor and sets it apart from all the realistic post-apocalyptic cities out there. We’ve seen that. We want to do something different. We want a landscape that reflects what our characters see, not what it would necessarily look like in reality. While we’re not gonna go full-on Expressionistic here (I’m not sure we’re at an artistic level where we can handle that, either), I do want to use Expressionist themes wherever we can.

- J.S. Conner

January 24th 2014