Captain Kekistan Influence Map 2.0

It's basically your favorite thing mixed with your other favorite thing!

Awhile back I made an influence map of Captain Kekistans’ main Inspirations. At the time I was happy with it I guess, but it felt kind of bloated. Like I was haphazardly throwing in a bunch of stuff that I liked (except Thor: Ragnarok) for no other reason than I liked it and then calling it an influence. True, things I like are going to find their way into Captain Kekistan by simple virtue of me liking them AND writing and drawing Captain Kekistan but “Homages to” is not quite the same thing as “Influenced by”.

So I decided to redo the influence map with a streamlined focus. WHAT was being influenced in Captain Kekistan and how was it being influenced? The categorizes I settled on were “Characters”, “World”, “Themes”, and “Tone”. These are the elements that I will be attributing the following inspirations to.

The Characters:

Minoriteam is an American adult animated television series on Cartoon Network's late night programming block, Adult Swim. It ran from 2005 to 2006, with a total of one season and 20 episodes. Minoriteam is still the biggest inspiration for the characters of Captain Kekistan. If I were to eventually reduce the Captain Kekistan influence map to just a single property it would be Minoriteam. I still love the Kirby inspired Art and designs. I actually had the idea of Captain Kekistan long before I had the IDEA of Captain Kekistan. Let me explain. I read and enjoyed political comics long before I got political. A more artistically and intellectually immature me would often lament that these artists didn't use their amazing talent to tell an actual story. Then I wondered what a story in that world would look like. What if the political comic didn't stop after one single panel but went on for pages? What if it was the entire book? A political comic world existing in perpetuity, a Ben Garrison World, so to speak. Minoriteam was probably the first time I caught a glimpse of what that world might look like. And it was a superhero world, no less! I loved it, and I still love it. And since Minoriteam seems to have been all but expunged from the Internet, they must've done something right.

The World:

The American Dream is a 2011 animated film produced and written by Tad Lumpkin and Harold Uhl. It's a fun setting for outlandish heroes to have fun defeating garish criminals and their nefarious schemes while fulfilling a sense of civic responsibility the creators probably felt. It's relevant and topical while still being fun and absurd. You don't want to talk about the real life villains in the world today? That's fine. But what if they were SUPERvillians? With suits and masks? And what if we threw in some action, and time travel, and mechs? Well, now we're getting somewhere. Now we can have some fun. Now we have a world where the mundane can be viewed through the lens of the fantastic. And even if you're not buyin’ what they're sellin’, you can still have fun looking through the window.

The Themes:

The Conduit is a 2008 first-person shooter video game developed by High Voltage Software for the Wii console. While there are no shortage of conspiracy theory laden media in the world, or even on this list, The Conduit is unique in that it is one of the media I have the most experience with. I always liked conspiracy theories as a form of entertainment. Haarp, Reptilians, Mk ultra, Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, Hollow Moon, I love them all. They seem like a separate, hybrid genre of Suspense and Science Fiction. And some of the most conspiracy theory related fun I've ever had was playing through The Conduit on my Wii hugging each and every wall à la Wolfenstein or Doom, scanning surfaces with my Atu-Waa (A.S.E: All See Eye) looking for secret messages. Than pausing the game so I could Google the message and go down a rabbit hole of Ufology and secret cover-ups. Every jot and tittle of alien graffiti was another glimpse behind the curtain into a secret world and it's invisible monarchies. Stuff completely unrelated to the story but added to the world by it's mere presence there AND here. I loved this world building detail in The Conduit.

The Tone:

There were quite a few properties to choose from for my inspiration for the tone of Captain Kekistan. The Tick, Freakazoid, Darkwing Duck, Thor: Ragnarok. I had settled on the 1987 animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with its Teenagers from Dimension X and Attack of the Mutant Pizzas, when I realized that while all of these were silly camp, they weren't silly camp in the same way the 1960s Batman was silly camp. Because 1960s Batman was explicitly comic book-esque silly camp. Now, I've never seen any documentaries or heard any commentary about the 1960s Batman series. I don't know if they loved the comics and attempted to make the episodes live action versions of the books, out of love and respect for the source material. Or if they hated the comics and the series just reflects their mockery and disdain for something perceived as childish tripe. Or maybe they were completely indifferent towards the comics and just made the series absurdly comic because they thought that was the assignment. In any case the series is undeniably comic in a way that none of the other options were. Profoundly, obscenely comic with its in your face Onomatopoeia and cartoon bombs and shark repellent. Did it make sense? Nope. But I can only imagine the writers were abiding by the 60s television version of The Rule of Cool. And ended up creating a cult classic, even with all the criticisms. It's a series that has even more charm in the current GrimDark era of goth soap operas.

Conclusion:

https://x.com/Fresherluke/status/1671495816698011648

It was hard to narrow things down and I had to cut things that really kind of fit what I want to do with Captain Kekistan, The Umbrella Academy comics for example, but I did want to include one “Honorable Mention” and share a book that I hope illustrates what an ideal Captain Kekistan comic universe looks like. And so far Something Man by FresherLuke on Twitter (or X, whatever) is one of the best examples. I think it does a pretty good job of meeting all the criteria I set for myself and I really can't recommend this book enough. And he's working on #2 which is great news.

So that's it I guess. Thank you for your time everyone. And Captain Kekistan WILL return!

Kek!