In WAR OF THE WORLDS there is a scene in which the main character meets a soldier who has lost his mind due to the extraterrestrial invasion and takes refuge in an imaginary world in which people live underground in order to create a new civilization far away from the Martians – an impossible task for mankind already defeated at this point of the story. I wanted to show this vision in the graphic novel as well.
Now it is said that for some pictures you should be inspired by things you know in order to be able to design them convincingly. From the time of my studies I know the kind of famous Wuppertal suspension railway, which I always found to be a bizarre expression of the idea around 1900 of how one would move over a city “in the future”. The aesthetics of the original suspension railway stations had always fascinated me, and so I took them as inspiration for the soldier’s imagination. Here you can see an imaginary underground transport station of the soldier’s vision, looslely based on the designs of old stations of the Wuppertal suspension railway that are no longer existing.