I've been rereading Occult Supergiant, and the Messiah page really resonated with me. But I wanted to ask, what was the main inspiration behind the Series and specific characters you consider the most interesting?
Occult Supergiant, like so many other things I make, is kind of this heady melange of multiple things that have influenced me but surfaces the traits of the things that specifically obsessed me at the time. The format of the book - the character portraits and accompanying descriptive vignettes, the quasi-religious tone, the preponderance of "occult" or Christian imagery was drawn heavily from Wayne Barlowe's "Brushfire Portfolio", a supplemental collection of paintings to his larger "Inferno", while the "Junk scifi" vibe owes something to Nirasawa, Hayashida and actually Destiny, which I had just discovered at the time.
The whole setting was reverse-engineered from the "Prisoner of the Occult Supergiant" painting I did and then immediately decided I wanted to do more of, haha, and was defined very much by a desire to create a total blank cheque for myself. The metamorphic nature of the setting, the immense age and historical span coupled with immortality, the idea of hundreds of disparate cultures and nomadic spacefarers being stranded together was designed to make Anything possible, which meant every character could follow a totally different whim of mine as I worked thru the book. That same approach has been revived with an even greater license (ie. cyberspace, the infinite horizon of visual and cultural kaleidoscopes) in One Thousand Heavens.
If I had to pick a specific character(s) - the Scavenger Emperor is the one around whom I imagined a narrative of sorts coalescing - if I ever return there, I want to explore him more and the resistance to his desire to turn the planet into a crucible for his ideal reality. The conceit of someone throwing themselves willingly into hell to turn it into the capital of their burgeoning future universal hegemony was very cool to me, and i'd love to pick a ragtag team of freaks to oppose his desires in the name of human dignity, representing those who were cast into hell without a choice but made it a chance to become their best selves, accepting the changes it brought instead of trying to turn them to personal advantage. Some of his design actually leaked through into Atavaka from Slave Zero X, and I even snuck his art into a lore entry, implying that the "Iron Emperor", a deposed tyrant within the setting resembled him haha.
Thank you so much for asking! I think you're the first person in a long time to bring it up, and it still means a great deal to me. I think it's my most "complete" work to date in the artbook field - but i'm hoping to top it with 1kH!