INFLUENCE: Neon Genesis Evangelion
This one is another more subliminal influence that didn’t hit me until late last year.
I first became aware of Evangelion in, I guess, 8th grade. I started off just watching AMVs and buying the manga, but when I finally got a DVD player I quickly did what I could to grab a few volumes on DVD. In my younger days, I loved almost everything about that series, and I felt like I really identified with Shinji, the protagonist. I was more than anything else in love with the designs for the Eva units themselves, and for the angels they fought.
A little while later, upon realizing that Shinji was a whiny bitch and that there was too much crying and stupid humor and not enough berserk Eva 01 stabbing things in the face, I dropped it, but by then the damage had already been done, more than I had expected. For years, thoughts of Evangelion rarely if ever crossed my mind, and I wasn’t seeing much new stuff out there that would be really inspired from it.
Cut to late last year, when I’m developing the first draft for Other Sleep, before it really had a name, just the initial character concept and some other bits and pieces. Like I initially wrote last month, Altered States was one of the pivotal foundations for it, and I was well aware of that. Then I came across this when I was going through old pictures on my computer:
…Well damn, that’s REALLY familiar imagery right there, isn’t it? I had chopped up my old manga volumes to use in collage stuff sometime after high school, thinking I’d never read them again, but I kept these pages intact and scanned them at some point or another, so clearly they were burned into my young mind and then receded into the depths or some such. That’s kind of cool really, to learn that something heavily influenced you without even realizing it.
I also blame my heavy use of green and purple in my work on the design of Eva 01. I also lay blame on a specific level of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but that is neither here nor there.
[Brett]
Other Sleep 