Where did they all come from?

The obvious answer is - from my brain. But of course, there have been some 'external' influences, as well.

	Willie surely has a bit of me, though not as much as Shannon. She has a damn lot of Rin in Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura. Interestingly enough, her story was also a bit influenced by the 'Thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother' episode of Kieslowski's Dekalog. Besides, there was a girl at my school in 3rd-4th grade who was into sailing and looked like Willie.
	Shannon is the one who has the most of me - she looks like me, she acts like me, she has a scar fetish like me ... If I would have read Berusayu no Bara while creating her character, I would probably have mentioned the influence of Lady Oscar. But I didn't, so it's just coincidental.
	Seraphine is partly based on some love interests I've had earlier, who were too shy to do anything by themselves. And, of course, he has a bit of my pig Sergei. There is also a little bit of Samuel West as the clerk Leonard Bast in Howard's End in him.
	Samona is for a quite small part based on me, and for a slightly bigger part on my sister. Apart from that, there is no one else who has had any influence on her personality. In the earliest phase of the comic's development she was an octopus, but in that shape she didn't have any specific models at all ...
	Eva, like everyone else, has a bit of me, but she has also had quite a lot of other models. When I was very small, I read the sleazy books about Hannah by Paul-Loup Sulitzer, and thought they were great. Then, there are many heroines in the early books of Anja Kauranen/Snellman who've had a big influence on her, first and foremost Sonja O. And there is Eva Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg (the book, dude - not the film): that might be where her name came from in the first place. And the groundbreaking influence for Eva in her 'own' stories was Brigitte Lin's character in Wong Kar-Wai's Chunking Express - one of the very best films ever made, in my humble opinion. (There's some of Takeshi Kaneshiro's Cop 223 in Ting Yay, too ...)
	Aeron has gotten some random influence from people like Yuta in Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid comics, Manji in Blade of the Immortal (not that much, actually), Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and Vargen (Wolf) in the Swedish cult comic Bamse. But mostly he's just the kind of person I wish there were more of.

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