JUDD has been out for nearly a month! Thank you everyone for the support so far! I’ve talked about the inspirations of the cover. Akira and Michael Vey of course. Like I said, the cover was always meant to be themed in blue, why? Because it’s my favorite color. It also looks good for the night sky behind the lowly rumbling parked car with nobody in it that startles Sam on his walk home after the betrayal he experiences. Strap in, this one came out rather long.
If you don’t already know, I don’t want it to be any kind of secret, JUDD is the debut of a series called The Fragmented Chronicles. Every book is going to have a different color theme and that is partially based on my (just kidding, our) flag of LGBTQIA+ pride, but I don’t plan on using every color. In relation to that, all I’ll say is that the next book’s color theme is purple, because that’s Erika’s favorite color besides rainbow. Anyway, I’ve always been enthralled by Fantasy—high, low, urban, everything—and always wanted to create my own world made out of everything I loved in fiction.
JUDD has so many inspirations sprinkled into it, the big few, superhero comic-books, anime, manga and high school dramas. I’ve kept up with many comic-book storylines, I loved the Batman, Fantastic Four and Spawn for the longest time, I got in the biggest trouble for the ladder due to it’s nudity, ironically, the naked women obviously did nothing for me. Some of my favorite storylines are Batman: The Killing Joke, Phoenix and Dark Phoenix Sagas, X-Men vs. Avengers, House of M, Infinity Saga, Secret Wars and I kept up with Young Avengers for a while. Yeah, lots of Marvel.
Manga and anime I’ve kept up with include Soul Eater, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Naruto, Bleach, Death Note. As well as many of the anime all of us 90’s kids grew up with on Toonami, I’m sure I don’t have to name the obvious few. Shonen Jump was the bulk of my manga consumption, with the exception of the few that weren’t that I’d go out and buy. JUDD pulls small inspirations from a lot of the things I love in fiction and that includes tons of novels and movies that maybe I’ll get into in a later blog entry specifically dedicated to those things.
Three things worth mentioning that did directly inspire a lot of what is JUDD was, The Perks of Being a Wallflower—specificallt the trope that Brad filled—Simon vs. the Homo Sapien Agenda and Disney’s Sky High. I know, a weird combination. After reading Perks, and finding the trope of a closeted jock so interesting even with it’s commonality, it’s rarely been touched upon as a main character, so I started drafting a comedy drama from that point of view. When I was done to a point of showing it to my best friend—even though I wasn’t going to share it on anything more than FictionPress.Net—I felt as though it was missing something, but she didn’t know either—including the title at that point.
We put on a movie, our favorite cornball one at the time that happened to be Sky High (a classic) and the idea came to us, what if we put superpowers in it. I’ve always loved comics, superheroes and at this time the Marvel Cinimatic Universe was just getting it’s feet with the first Avengers either having just come out or it was getting ready to. With Erika’s help we began drafting what we called JUDD originally as a placeholder. In the same way we slowly fell in love with the short and simple title, we fell in love with this world called Comet Cove that we were creating and publishing began being talked about between us. Then I read Simon a few years later after it was released and it gave me the bravery to to touch upon so many other topics in the next draft, the main one being not having the deal coming out, as I myself did not have the ideal coming out.
I know I’ve told that story before but you’ll find some portions of stories will repeat in other stories. Oh, yeah, there’s also the backstory information that came from my stoned brain getting great ideas from watching Ancient Aliens, but that’s something for later.
This is not a definitive list of my inspiration and you’ll likely find out a lot more about me as time goes on and I continue with this blog. That’s the way I plan it to be anyway, I want there always to be something new to learn about me, so if I hold back on something that people are curious about, it’s likely going to be gotten into later. Especially if I get legitimate questions on things. Never be afraid to comment below, I want to communicate with you guys and will respond to as many comment as I can in the first week of each entry being posted
Thanks for reading,
~ J. D. 💙🖤
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JUDD Links
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FRAGMENTS Links
Chapter Previews
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
These chapters do not reflect the final product, it is a draft prior to the final draft.
J. D. Toombs's Website 