There’s been some conversation going on in the comments section of one of the previous comics that’s talked about the mesh of different elements from different time periods that have made appearances in the comic so far, and it got me thinking about things. So tonight, I’m gonna ramble for a while, and hopefully, you’ll enjoy the ride 🙂
One of the things that made the most impression on me as a kid was a movie called “Streets of Fire.” It was criminally ignored back during it’s release in 1984, but to a 10 year old kid, it planted the seeds for a lot of things. Streets of Fire was a stylistic mix of 50’s cars, and 60’s Motown, and 50’s style with present day elements buried in the background. And it has this architecture style that was 40’s/50’s with a worn look to it that suggested to me that the movie was set farther in the future (early 21st century, maybe). It was rainy streets, and neon reflecting in puddles, and mist and steam at night. And it had this dystopian air to everything that called to mind a lot of the scifi that I was coming to love as well.
It was advertised as a rock and roll fable at the time of it’s release, and to this day there’s hasn’t been anything like it since.
“Another place, another time.”
One of the things that I loved about was the mixture of styles. I loved the fact that you didn’t quite know what world it was set in. You didn’t know where it really was from. It was the world next door, maybe. A world where the A-Bomb hadn’t been invented, and WW2 had finally ended a couple of decades after it did here. The ambiguity was what appealed to me the most, though. Because when you think about it, it could be set any where, or any when you wanted it to be.
Back when a 10 year old kid saw this in the Scottsdale Mall movie theater in South Bend, Indiana (a theater, and a mall that doesn’t even exist anymore) it blew his tiny little mind 😉 The idea of it, this mixture of different elements has been what drove Requiem from almost the beginning. It’s as much about the uncertainty of what world you’re really on as much as it is about the answers to the mysteries. It’s fabulation, or at least what a ten year old kid thought of fabulation as.
One of our characters; Jonathan Delrain said something once comic-wise that I’ve said many times over the years “Nothing without purpose”. There’s a reason for everything. From the dream symbolism floating through the current section of the comic, to the crystalline reflection that permeates many of the things you see here, even to the use of dark glasses among the people who have been changed by the Sentience Virus (and it’s not just to hide the fact that their iris’s have shifted color) But while there is a reason for everything, the feel comes from the eyes of a ten year old child. A ten year old child who realized that what he wanted to do more than anything else in his life was to build worlds.