I came up with the concept for my comic book back in 2004. I remember it specifically when I drew a Rugged Young Man in a trenchcoat in a then-simple character design sketch in a spiral notebook with all my other earlier drawings. I remember it was 2004 when I dated the page.
There are three titles in specific that were the driving inspirational force behind the Vision of Mono and Parallax, where all my martial arts action violent comics started.
The First and Foremost thing that inspired Mono was Quentin Tarantino's 2003 film, Kill Bill Vol. 1. I never got around to watching Volume II I loved Volume I so much! I loved the anime sequence by production IG and the finale sword fighting wuxia sequence of the film the most. After that, I knew Kill Bill had established a new kind of Female Martial Art Ass-Kicker Archetype, and I didn't want to rip that element off". I know I wanted to create a male action-hero protagonist of some sort, a sort of Brad Pitt Fight Club with Kill Bill's The Bride's new-fangled "Woo-Ping Yuen choreography routine" But instead of make it a movie, make it a storyboard animation movie in comic book and-or manga format.
I remember seeing the film in the theatre with a friend when it first came out, and thinking "This film is as good as Ghost in the Shell was when I got that on VHS. It was so...Violent! And Action-y! And...Yellow! And Choreographed! And BLOODY! And I began sketching random things in my sketchbook, not having any idea how much Tarantino and Kill Bill Vol. I would ultimately end up influencing my own vision. I remember wanting to do something visually similar to many aspects of Kill Bill, except, instead of Bright Yellow, I wanted to take that Bright Yellow and ink it pitch black, so it eventuall evolved into a Blade of the Immortal type Frank Miller Noir Sin City thing as well, with guns and trenchcoats and all that. But "black trenchcoat films" like The Matrix, Versus, and A Better Tomorrow also ended up being some pretty heavy influences. I owe everything to those films/manga. If it weren't for those films, if they weren't made the way they were, I might not be writing and drawing comics today (www.webcomicsnation.com/jm), and if I was, I'd probably be drawing something else.
