As David Lynch once said: “the film is the thing”. And for Hull-based comic book artist Jake Machen, it’s also an uncomplicated matter: “the comic is the comic”. That’s why he made a whole comic just to say it. His comic collection Verdant Dreams looks authentically retro, like alternative anime magazines or 90s Sonic The Hedgehog picture books, but they’re firmly from our current day. It’s not just the half-tone textures and analogue printed aesthetics that sell it to the viewer, it’s something about the bubbly characters, large eyes, classic action lines, speech bubbles and onomatopoeic block lettering.
Jake achieves his very particular style with paper, ink and pencil, then flips over sketches to a lightbox for shading and deeper colouring. Once scanned, he turns the shadings into a half-tone pattern using Photoshop. He’s spent years scanning in old magazines, comics and Letraset catalogues, so his large visual library allows him to collage colours and mimic the textures behind the linework. In one panel, he even directly references the famous stairs artwork by Dutch graphic artist MC Escher.