It all began when Cloud Strife was acting strangely. He had been a weirdo right from the beginning, of course, but now it was becoming serious. He and his friends were in the Temple of Ancients, and they had just run into Sephiroth. Cloud wasn’t himself anymore. Actually, he didn’t seem to be the person he claimed to be, without being aware of it. And that was the moment when I realized, “Wow, this story goes WAY deeper than I thought at first!”
It was the turn of the millennium. I was sitting at a friend’s place, watching her playing the original Final Fantasy VII game on Playstation 1. I was quite content doing so, because I was more interested in the story than in the gameplay. I liked the characters and the blocky 3D graphics, a novelty at that time. Yet I had not considered myself a FF7 fan until this moment when the story revealed one of its pivotal plot points.
My serious involvement with FF7 fandom must have begun in May 2002, considering the time stamp of the earliest files of fanart. The fanart images I had downloaded from several fan pages at that time were all of Japanese origin. I color-printed some of them out and pasted them onto a large sheet of paper and hung it onto my room’s door – something I’ve never done before. I had never been a fan of anything or anybody to the extent that I put up posters.
The Inspiration
But this should turn out to be a pivotal plot point – for me. When I watched those stunningly beautiful Japanese FF7 fanart and doujinshi printouts, I knew I had found the language of my imagination.
I have been drawing all the time since I could hold a pencil, and I also thought about drawing comics at some point, but I lacked an idea for a story and an inspiring drawing style. I was barely familiar with manga because it had just started to become popular. But those doujinshi printouts revealed to me the power of its cinematic imagery. And the complex story of FF7 provided the much-needed crystallization point for a story.
How I came across “Sink To the Bottom With You”, I cannot remember for sure. Most likely, that friend of mine I mentioned earlier found it first and showed it to me. According to the time stamp of the files, I downloaded it from the web in June 2002. Catalina’s vivid writing style and her head-on interpretation of the characters ignited my imagination immediately. In 2005, I asked for her permission to “mangaize” her fanfic and publish it on my freshly established website, and she happily agreed.
The Realization
However, it took some time until I became accustomed to the typical manga drawing style. When I started with “Sink”, I wanted to create a cinematic experience, but I found the ink/halftone style a bit too two-dimensional, so I started at first with a technique that is used for drawing movie storyboards.
In order to recreate the game’s locations, I had to play the game myself (which turned out to be fun – for the most part). There were no tools available to easily gain access to fields and backgrounds, or maybe I just didn’t know about them. And Youtube had just been invented, so there were no gameplay videos that would’ve saved me a lot of time. I used an emulator software to play the Playstation game on computer, and I took screenshots of all needed locations. Concept art of characters and other stuff were available on the internet.
With chapter 11, a change of style took place. The characters became more and more “realistic”, with bigger noses and smaller eyes. The influence of “Final Fantasy 7 – Advent Children” was partly responsible, because I tried to adapt to the style of the 3D characters. More variations followed; I experimented with quite a few other things, and with Chapter 20, I finally returned to a style similar to the one I had started with.
Unfortunately, Catalina ceased to continue her fanfic after chapter 42, but I kept on drawing until 2017, when I had to stop as well with chapter 22. Other things were claiming my attention. In the meantime, I had started to work on an original manga story. This manga is currently being prepared for publication: ***COMING SOON*** VJ (provisional project name)
