Jake Machen’s charming bubblegum comics transport us back to the anime magazines of yore

As David Lynch once said: “the film is the thing”. And for Hull-based comic book artist Jake Machen, it’s also an uncomplicated matter: “the comic is the comic”. That’s why he made a whole comic just to say it. His comic collection Verdant Dreams looks authentically retro, like alternative anime magazines or 90s Sonic The Hedgehog picture books, but they’re firmly from our current day. It’s not just the half-tone textures and analogue printed aesthetics that sell it to the viewer, it’s something about the bubbly characters, large eyes, classic action lines, speech bubbles and onomatopoeic block lettering.

Jake achieves his very particular style with paper, ink and pencil, then flips over sketches to a lightbox for shading and deeper colouring. Once scanned, he turns the shadings into a half-tone pattern using Photoshop. He’s spent years scanning in old magazines, comics and Letraset catalogues, so his large visual library allows him to collage colours and mimic the textures behind the linework. In one panel, he even directly references the famous stairs artwork by Dutch graphic artist MC Escher.

Verdant Dreams is a reminder of why fan culture is so important – better yet, it’s nutritional for creativity. It’s a blast to flip through this collection and find overt homages to Kirby, the black mages from Final Fantasy, or the fearsome eternal dragon Shenron from Dragon Ball Z. After all, those characters are baked into our pop culture, especially on the side of gaming and manga. Even the gorgeous cover of Verdant Dreams references the bold, 3D covers to Nintendo 64 games such as Quest 64, Mischief Makers or Yoshi’s Story.

Jake references all of his comic heroes in Verdant Dreams: Violence Jack’s spiky barnet, the luscious colours of Dragon Ball, the fantastical worlds of Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland. The narrative follows themes of cyberpunk, as well as the tension between the natural and the unnatural and nature versus technology. “The comic I made before this (Full Metal) Trenchcoat was set in an invasively technological world with an attempt at a dense plot,” says Jake. “This comic is the opposite of that, set in a world of natural abundance that has not yet been suffocated by the relentless march of progress and with a more relaxed decompressed storytelling style. I tried to let the story happens at its own pace with no urgency for explanation, just something to read over time.”