Hark, she speaks! D: It’s been a while!
(Grassblades: Hansel and Gretel edition would be – well let’s be honest, it would be 100% entirely silly)
If you like Grassblades, you can pitch in on Patreon and help keep it going for less than a cup of coffee a month – which is great, because I drink tea, not coffee.
Okay that is totally not what I expected her to say!
Your comic is super awesome and engaging! The details after the flats are just amazing! The cat masks are so cool, too!
I have a question–I noticed that the comic seems based around Japanese culture with the architecture and maybe a little Chinese. Whydid you chose these cultures? I’m sorry if I’m wrong about this! (I could say Asian culture but that would include India, Cambodia, etc.)
You have one CRUMBY mood, Masa-castle. (Crumby=crummy) (Shiro/shirou means “castle” in Japanese, so Masa-shiro!)
Aw, thank you! <3 I'm so happy you like it!
As for your question!
Grassblades is heavily based on East Asian cultures (with, yes, Japan being the dominant influence, with pinches of China, Korea and trace elements of other nations around the South China Sea thrown in for good measure) because I've been immersed in pop culture from that part of the world for a long time. I have read - and still read! - a metric ton of manga, and love watching Asian costume drama movies (you know, stuff like House of Flying Daggers and Reign of Assassins), and with all of that rattling around in my brain, deciding to do a comic that draws heavily on that came naturally.
Grassblades is at least in part a love-letter to all of my favourite stories; it's me picking out the things I like from those stories, adding a whole heaping spoonful of new stuff, chucking it all in a blender and coming up with something that is entirely its own thing. 🙂 There are elements in there of stuff like Lone Wolf and Cub, Usagi Yojimbo, Blade of the Immortal and Vagabond, but also more obscure stuff like 365 Samurai and a Few Bowls of Rice by JP Kalonji, and that one Korean costume drama movie I watched once a decade ago (I think it was called MUSA: The Warrior and the Princess of the Desert?), and more non-obvious inspirations, like Hellboy.
That's not to say that this is me just copying ideas off of the comics I love reading; I'm really just taking my love for all of these things, passing them through the sieve that is my brain, and it comes out on the other end as its own original thing.
It just so happens that there is a lot of East Asian-based pop-cultural things in my brain for it to pass though. 🙂
…it seems that Akane is the speaker in the last panel bit, and I feel like that’s something completely out of character for her to say. Part of it is possibly due to her not speaking, so we’ve never seen what she’s like…
But yeah, that threw me out.
Yeah, I know, that speechbubble is poorly placed – it is Masahiro speaking. I’ve edited the page, and will be re-uploading the fixed version ASAP.
Well, he’s right about them being idiots.
Still, they were going for the kill right off the bat, within a few yards of a huge crowd. Makes me think they wanted M and/or A dead specifically. DO they know about the blues? Or did he go crazy and kill someone’s kin when he first got them, and they’re out for revenge? Or are they just really ballsy robbers?