Vis Dev: The River Thames

Two books I used as source material about the Thames River while working on WAR OF THE WORLDS. On the left: the back of my cat Tommy leaning in.

What always fascinated me about WAR OF THE WORLDS was that it is set in real locations in southern England, places that H.G. Wells apparently knew like the back of his hand, so well did he describe them and their atmosphere. The towns which the Martian siege comes upon in the novel can still be visited today, and only few have changed significantly since the time the story took place.

The course of the Thames, neighbor of many of these towns, has not changed, too. In order to be able to represent the relation between the river and these places of action historically true, I had bought these two books during a visit to England years before starting work on the graphic novel. They are illustrated with a depiction of the river flow and historic photos of the towns and cities near to it, picture sources that you don’t find so easily together in one volume (for example I needed a contemporary depiction of Walton bridge and how it is situated on the river, and I found it here).