What is Retro Sci-Fi?

You know that cliché joke “Dude, where’s my flying car?”

It’s somewhat persistent bit of humor that creeps into the edge of our popular culture every few years. TED has a whole page about it, literally called where’s my flying car, Popular Mechanics revisits the concept quite frequently, and the Smithsonian even had an exhibit all about it. But my favorite is the old IBM commercial with Avery Brooks, the man who played Captain Sisko on Deep Space 9, complaining that it’s the year 2000 and there aren’t any flying cars. He was promised flying cars!

The flying car is one of the cornerstones of retro sci fi.  And retro sci fi has become the newest obsession with me and my art work. That doesn’t mean I’m about to show you a ton of drawings of flying cars. Nah, I’m here to talk about retro futurism, Utopian sci fi, bright colors, 1950s ray guns, 1960s starship designs, and how everything old is sleek and hi-tech again!

This blog is basically an engine to explore the inspiration for my newest comic book project: Spacejacked. It’s a combination of a lot of the things I really like in sci-fi comics, movies and television. And as I did more and more research for reference materials to help me draw out the ideas in my head, I realized this inspiration was something called retro sci-fi.

So I’ll just cut to the basics: I am heavily influenced by the look and feel of the original Star Trek, Space: 1999, the old Star Blazers cartoon, and the old comic book series Captain Johner and the Aliens. And when I sat down to try and sketch out a way I would draw a science fiction, I started to see the same aesthetic core of my art style latch onto those things. This is pretty much how my process goes.

I like bright colors, flat and basic. It shows in all of my art. That ends up shaping my taste in comic art, where I really go for the stuff from the silver age, even in Sci-Fi. And so what I ended up sketching out was something cartoonish, very inspired by the original Star Trek series, including what little I’d seen of the Gold Key comics of the 1960s and the old Captain Jonner comics I’d read as a kid.

But the story, the structure, the items, the technology, it all works in a modern way. I’m trying to incorporate ideas like quantum teleportation, current observations of exoplanets, and 3D printing into how the sci-fi technology in the future I’m creating works.

This creates the look that I soon discovered was Retro Sci-Fi.

When I sat the drawing board I realized I was going to tell a pretty standard Utopian sci-fi story. As with my foray into Superhero comics and parody, the Adventures of Superchum, I’m more comfortable with a positive story. Dark dystopic sci-fi is fun to watch, but I can’t write it effectively. And my own art style doesn’t come close to capturing it.

For my happy futurism infused sci-fi tale I wanted to create a space faring organization, much like Kirk’s Starfleet or Jason’s Star Command. And I wanted this story to have a lot of the trappings of the old Star Trek – primarily because the voyages of Kirk, Spock and McCoy are so ingrained in our culture that it’s an easy motif to tap into.

But I also wanted more of that era. 

• The ray guns and rocket ships of the serials and the cheesy sci-fi that came before them.
  
• The big glass bowl space helmets.
  
• The toy laser pistols and laser swords I used to play with as a child.
  
• And the iconic flying saucers and missile shaped rockets.
  

That’s when I started to realize this inspiration ran deeper with me than just wanting to capture old Star Trek.

As all of this pop culture influence and nostalgia from my own childhood began to mix in with my sketching, the idea began to take shape. I ended up with a design that incorporated elements of Star Trek’s uniforms and Star Blazers’ uniforms. A 1950s inspired ray gun. And yeah, that’s a Bluetooth ear bud instead of a communicator.

This became the anchor I built the rest of the series around. And set me down the path of constantly Google Searching the phrase Retro Sci Fi, poring over thousands of images, posters, drawings, all to inspire the look and feel I wanted to capture in the series. Reconnecting me with these ideas:

• The future can be bright and hopeful!
  
• Science Fiction has inspired actual science and this cycle can continue!
  
• My art style fits these themes very well in this context!
  

The first story is a 5 issue tale that encompasses everything I’ve found on my odyssey through the web discovering the motifs, ideas and look of retro sci-fi.