By Zack Quaintance — Today we’re going to dive into something a little bit different. Instead of talking about a recent experience I’ve had running the Kickstarter for my first comic, Next Door, I’m going to take a look at five stories that helped to inspire the story you’ll read when you get your hands on the book. I’ll go into details about the ways that each of these stories influenced Next Door, with the hope that this glance at the intersection of topics will help understand why the campaign, cover art, and promotional material has taken shape the way that it has.

BTTM FDRS. This book (which is so so good that it landed on our Best Graphic Novels of 2019) doesn’t have much in common with Next Door in terms of genre touches, creator perspectives, and really just overall execution. But it heavily involves the way the housing crisis is effecting individuals. One thing I took from this book pretty directly while writing Next Door, was the way it defiantly refused to let anyone off the hook for problems like soaring rent and gentrification. And I’m not talking about calling politicians or landlords to account, but rather folks who for reasons convenient to their own lives buy into areas where long-time residents are being pushed out. That’s a BIG theme in Next Door.
Learn More: BTTM FDRS

The Dregs. If we do our jobs right, Next Door will fit into the same lineage with The Dregs…proving that community housing crisis can very much be a theme within engaging comic book storytelling. The Dregs is one of my personal favorite horror comics in recent years, and it was perhaps the first book to show me how well dissecting class issues around housing and the homeless can lend itself to exploration in this medium.
Learn More: The Dregs

Goodnight Paradise. And if The Dregs was the comic that planted that seed, Goodnight Paradise was the book that sealed it. This is a book that couldn’t exist without the drastic and violent housing price surges that have hit the most desirable communities in the country, places like where this comic is set, Venice Beach. Our book was inspired quite a bit by living in California as well, although I think we’ve come up with more of a Northern California feel than this book’s very Southern California setting, but we’ve both drawn from the frontline of the housing crisis as played out in California, where I’ve recently lived and where artist Pat Skott currently resides. There’s also a layer of realism in this story that we sought to include in our book as well. That’s not to say wild things don’t happen in our comic, but we paid close attention to details such as what our characters are drinking, and it was a level of detail that I know that I really appreciated seeing executed so well in Goodnight Paradise.
Learn More: Goodnight Paradise

The Last Black Man in San Francisco. This was one of my favorite films of 2019, a gorgeous and haunting look at San Francisco and the way that housing is pushing out long-time residents, especially Black residents and other members of marginalized communities. Through the lens of our privileged central characters we tackle that same territory in our pages as well.
Learn More: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Stray Bullets. Ah, now we get to the fun part…which feels like an odd thing to say about a book as gnarly as Stray Bullets, but here we are. When Pat Skott and I first started developing Next Door, the only thing he told me was that he wanted some practice illustrating everyday scenarios. We didn’t have to do a slice of life comic, but he’d already drawn quite a bit of sci-fi and fantasy. He wanted to try something new. I was reading Stray Bullets at the time, perhaps the single greatest crime comic ever made, and as I result, I was freshly aware of how over-the-top crime action could make domestic relationships and challenges more engaging. And, well, here we are!
Learn More: Stray Bullets

See you all back here tomorrow for some talk about two of my friends super successful Kickstarters, as well as the value of co-promoting!

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.