Tag: 2017

The major influences that I feel strongest about this year.

(left to right, top to bottom):  ElfQuest (ALWAYS), Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman), Locke & Key (which seized my imagination with its fairy-tale AND horror qualities), TV’s Wonder Woman (grace, beauty, strength, wisdom), Gargoyles (a revolutionary cartoon that taught us not to talk down to your viewers but instead, elevate and include them), Henry David Thoreau (because I too wish to live deliberately), Alpha Flight (my first Canadian super-team), The Bionic Woman (her stories felt deeper to me than her male counterpart’s), The Magician’s Nephew (C.S. Lewis’s Narnia was a mesmerizing land full of wonder and magic), Silent Hill (the creepy milieu, whose stories always center around the protagonist’s requirement to understand why they’re there in the first place before escaping, is just such classic psychological horror paired with the supernatural), Stephen King (my father began my voracious love of the horror genre with King’s books), and Dungeons and Dragons, which helped unlock the gateways to my own imagination and sharing it in a group to create shared narratives and stories.