Richard Blake: Visual Storyteller

Artist turned storyteller Richard Blake released one of the most imaginative titles of 2023 with his premiere series, Hexagon Bridge.

Published by Image Comics, this science fiction story is grand in design and simultaneously personal in the tale of a lone daughter spending years to find her parents lost in another dimension.

Spanning five issues, this mini series was a hit with critics earning an average of 8.8 on Comic Book Round Up and is a visually stunning experience from cover to the last panel.

Hexagon Bridge has been in the making for nearly four years and takes inspirations from works like Moebius, Bilal and Schuiten from the magazine, Heavy Metal.

Richard received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and his Master of Fine Art from Cornell University and while he has always considered himself an artist, he can now add comic book creator to his creative career.

To commemorate the collected edition of Hexagon Bridge (available in stores now), Richard was kind enough to talk about his storytelling journey, inspirations, what readers can expected in the future.

Seth A. Romo: The collected edition of Hexagon Bridge is out now, let’s start off talking more about that.

Richard Blake: I’ve just completed the first book and it’s something I’d like to continue. You never really know how these things are going to go, if it’s going to be an ongoing series or a self-contained graphic novel. I think [Hexagon Bridge] works well as a standalone story, but since I’ve built this world and established these characters, it is something I’d like to continue.

Getting to this point was a long process and I learned a lot about making a comic, publishing in the direct market—but it was a great experience and it feels good to be done and have to book out for people to enjoy.

Let’s talk about inspiration. This story involves A.I. and exploring different dimensions, how did that all come together?

[Inspiration] I got into comics later and didn’t go the usual route most people do. I discovered comics as a teenager, but eventually took the fine art route until rediscovering comics later on.

At the time of coming up with Hexagon Bridge, I was interested in parallel dimensions and was reading a book about psychedelic experiences, particularly on DMT. The idea that people were describing going to a similar place was interesting to me. I thought if this is a static place, it could probably be mapped.

I also learned about the Cassini family, the first family to make a topographic map of France. These two ideas—cartography and mapping other dimensions—came together to form the basis for Hexagon Bridge. Then it became about the drama within that situation, the different character arcs, and the conflicts that needed to be resolved.

You primarily identify as an artist, where does your storytelling side come from?

Telling stories has always interested me. I encountered cartooning through newspaper strips like The Far Side and Garfield. That was the first time I recognized that drawing could tell a narrative. I discovered comic books and realized you could form narratives around drawing, which was interesting to me. Although I got into painting and fine art, there was always a story somewhere in my work.

I had written stories and even considered going into prose writing. When I got into film, I wrote my own screenplays. So storytelling wasn’t completely new to me when I went into comics. It felt natural, even though I’m still learning a lot about how to tell stories and how I want to tell them.

Hexagon Bridge has such a unique visual style. What influenced your art for this comic book?

European comics from the 1980s definitely influenced my style. When I got into comics and started going to shops, I came across Marvel and DC books, but an issue of Heavy Metal with translated works of artists like Moebius and Enki Bilal really struck me. They had a different quality, often involving watercolor work or clear line art with watercolor underneath. I loved that look and tried to emulate it in Hexagon Bridge. Initially, I used traditional techniques like drawing on watercolor paper and painting the color, but it proved laborious. Eventually, I discovered beautiful digital watercolor brushes in Photoshop, which allowed me to achieve that look while bringing something new with modern tools.

There are a lot of larger scenes in the comic like architecture in Rome. What was your favorite set piece to draw?

The most challenging thing was the bridge itself. Deciding that it would be made up of fragments of old memories set an interesting foundation. The environments within the bridge function like memory islands made up of different pieces of architecture from various eras. These architectural hybrids were constantly shifting and moving. This allowed me to bring together various architectural elements and landscapes, forming interesting and unpredictable environments.

A.I. is such a hot topic right now, what made you decide to incorporate it into the story?

The bridge [to other dimensions in the story] is made up of memories and is affected by emotional responses. Human emotions become externalized and affect the environment, making it difficult for the human mind to maneuver.

A.I. can freely maneuver within the bridge without [emotions] affecting it. This was the initial reasoning behind using A.I. characters. Additionally, Staden, the A.I. character, is an extension of Adley, the protagonist. His personality is another aspect of her, reflecting her personality within the A.I.

The story is grand in scope, how was it fitting the narrative in five issues?

By the time I got to the end of the fifth issue, it was obvious that there was more to explore. There could have been a whole chapter on Adley and Stadin's connection. Fitting the grand scale of the story into five issues was challenging, but it set the foundation for future exploration.

With Hexagon Bridge done (for now), what can readers expect from you in the future.

I'd like to do is another science fiction story set in the early 1960s in New York that I’ve been wanting to work on. It was actually a story that I came up with around the same time as Hexagon Bridge, but I ended up going with Hexagon. Eventually, I'd like to do a kind of trilogy with Hexagon Bridge—another 10 issues to further explore that world and those characters.

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The collected edition of Hexagon Bridge is in stores now. To get your own copy and support local book stores, visit Bookshop.org.

For more on Richard Blake, be sure to follow him on Instagram (@evolvedisguise). This interview was edited for clarity. To listen to the full interview, check out the video below.