One of the main motivating factors for this arc was, besides corporations taking concepts and dragging them through the ground to make them homogenous and repetitive because they’re afraid of original ideas, was, well, original ideas and how (at least as I see it in comics) other people just starting to copy them to cash-in with the trend.

I don’t blame new artists just starting out. We all did that when we started. We took the visual styles of cartoons and comics we loved and tried to copy them because we wanted to be “as good as them“. But, along the path we start creating our own roads. My critique goes with people that’d been around for years and you see their styles de-evolve into this mass of samey looking characters and concepts, which become undistinguishable from one to another (more often than not I find myself thinking one person did them all). And it’s people who consider themselves as “creative“. To be fair, tho, at least they’re making comics… some of them.

Clink was born as a response to this. Back when the Scott Pilgrim movie came out and Adventure Time was picking a lot of steam, I went to two independent comic book shows (MoCCA and SPX). It was disheartening to see that a good chunk of people were copying those styles, especially from people I knew of before that had their own personal ones. On the bus back from New York to Boston, I created the characters and concept as a “See? Anyone can do this, now let’s do something different” commentary. And you can see it more in the early pages. But, I really liked the characters and ideas I had, so I couldn’t do that to myself, to do a hack job just to “make a point“. And even if it’s not like that anymore, may this arc serve as a “stepping out of it” mark.

 

Mario A.~