I absolutely loved those books, and I am sure there was some influence there. I just found a stack of the paperbacks when cleaning out my storage the other day. I can’t believe the first pub date on those was 1970.

I devoured them when I was a kid.

No, not even close. In fact, i just answered this question the other day on another post! LOL!

A Distant Soil predates those novels. Some portions of the comic were in fanzines in the early 1980’s. I’ve never read the McCaffrey books. Some of the pages you are looking at on this website were penciled as early as 1980.

I’m surprised this question came up twice in one week. For years, all anyone asked me is if I had pinched the idea of crystal magic from Marrion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover.

I recall my biggest influence was the first Superman movie (1978) with its crystal palace Fortress of Solitude, and an old issue of National Geographic, as well as New Age books about crystal spirituality which were common at the time.

But never was a McCaffrey fan, and never read those books.

It really seems like an obvious thing to me: if you are going to have a world dependent on crystal-based science/magic, you are going to need people to mine crystals.

ADS also takes about 12 hours per page. the art is not as highly rendered as the Vertigo GN’s, but I write it and, of course, I letter it by hand.

So 12 hours is about right. A really tough page might take 16.

There are a couple of double pages spread since the new GN’s that took at least five days per spread.

It’s financially taxing to take the much time on those spreads, but I think they are worth it.

I am pretty well paid for the Vertigo work, so per page I can afford the time. Unfortunately, ADS doesn’t earn nearly that much money, so I appreciate it when people come to my website to read my book instead of going to pirate sites.

Alas, Stuart Immonen got burned by pirates this week and has decided to end his webcomic Moving Pictures.