Photo: “Windmills through the Passenger Side Window”. Photo taken by me. (June 2022).
“When June came
The grasses headed out
And turned brown,
And the hills turned brown
Which was not a brown
But a gold and saffron
And red—
An indescribable color.
And from then on until the next rains the earth dried and the streams stopped.”
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Setting. Location.
I have heard stories of train companies (later confirmed to be true) that gave a discounted travel rate to aspiring writers who would benefit from a long-distance train ride. A story comes to life on a page when the details are so vivid that there is little doubt that it is based on a real place that the author has actually been.
Last Summer, I went on a road trip up California’s Central Valley, a route I have frequently explored alone through various long-distance bus rides. Three months later in September, I was reading the first chapter of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the first image that came to mind is the photograph I snapped while wearing a white dress with black polka dots while staring out the window enjoying the windmills (pictured above). I could picture the perfectly lined up fruit orchards; the honey sticks sold at a wooden stand; the tilled soil; the large mountains of almond shells covered with tarp; and a large stretches of cattle steer that smelled as pleasant as it sounds. It is quite majestic when a book has the ability to sweep me off to an actual place that I have been before—during a fifteen minute break between passing periods.
Attempting to recreate a real world setting one-hundred percent accurately can be difficult to maintain. Any references to now defunct businesses would date a story in the past, however it would make for an excellent tool if incorporating time travel into a story. Nothing sounds more like the Aughts than, “Tonight started out as a typical night out…but instead of walking down the normal street to Hollywood Video, we took a detour.”
Real world location settings can be quite tricky, especially in large cities with ever changing skylines and skyscraper development. If I were to write a story that took place at a hotdog restaurant from my childhood, the story would have to take place before nineteen-ninety six, the year the hotdog restaurant went out of business, in order to remain accurate.
Sometimes I go through old journals and many locations I mentioned no longer exist today. They are reminders of impermanence in this ever changing setting. Incorporating real locations into comics is one way to give them a permanent location long after they have been torn down and disappeared completely.
.::.
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My Own Private Central Valley
kawaiidaigakusei at 12:00AM, May 1, 2023
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acricket at 9:54AM, May 1, 2023
I also ready East of Eden around the same time then took a trip through similar locations a couple of months back. I had never taken in the shape and color of the hills and valleys before. It's also a powerful trip after reading The Grapes of Wrath. Location can be tricky in comics. When you draw even the background of an interior space, the viewer is mapping. It's a place you can box yourself in. I'm trying to go light in the beginning so I don't box myself in because I still don't know where I'm going. I think it's fine to have a lot of background detail, but it's such a good point that this can prevent timelessness, and you run the risk of dating your comic.
Andreas_Helixfinger at 8:09AM, May 1, 2023
The setting of my comics is set up to be this dysfunctional sort of thing, where things from my younger days is still used and maintained while also including futuristic elements. There are some locales I've heavily based off of places I've been to. Such as this basement jazz bar & casino restaurant that comes up in a later story arc of Molly Lusc which I based off of this really cool jazz bar & restaurant place me and a friend found in a basement hall on our London trip back in 2013.
PaulEberhardt at 3:03AM, May 1, 2023
...OR you do it the way I do and deliberately go all the way with anachronisms to get a timeless setting. For instance, I deliberately put my favourite baker's store in one of the backgrounds after the owner had retired and closed it down, as a way of honouring his lifework and saying thank you for all the Bremer Zwieback (a speciality you practically can't get any more now). There are almost only vintage cars on the streets, but people also use smartphones and the ads are a wild mix of old brands and parodies of more contemporary things. And so on. My only criterion is whether I like the design and think it fits the scene. In effect, I've apparently built a pretty sustainably-minded parallel universe where no one ever throws anything away and repairs it instead, except when something else is more fun to watch. I've seen this kind of thing done in much more serious works by others, as well.
PaulEberhardt at 2:57AM, May 1, 2023
With real world settings I'd always advise against 100% accuracy, because what with the world changing more and more rapidly, you'll invariably end up with lots of "mistakes". As for defunct brands, I'd say they don't actually fix your setting to a certain decade, no more than current brands would. It's rather about how consistently you use them, like if you want to set a story in, say, the 1950s, you'll need to do lots of research to avoid 60s things and put in the right amount of stuff left over from the 30s and 40s. If you don't do that, it'll look wrong, OR...