Salamandre Page 5

“We open on a visual cue that’s designed to give us a lot of information about the world our story is set in all in one go, and this is Kasper’s world, a world not completely unlike our own. The inspiration here is Ruritanian romances, a genre of stories set in a fictional Central/Eastern European country. Ruritania was a fictional country in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. There are lots of examples of this genre, not least of all Tintin’s Syldavia which featured in King Ottakar’s Sceptre, and Latveria, home of Marvel Comics’ Victor Von Doom. Everything about this version of Europe had to be familiar, as if this were a misremembered world. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

“I grew up speaking two languages (English and Polish) and I wanted to convey a sense of that bilingualism. French was an obvious choice since English speakers already have a fair bit of vocabulaire français and as Alexandre Dumas once wrote, ‘English is little more than badly pronounced French.’
As for the geopolitical situation, I once had a life drawing teacher who’d talk about left/right brain theory in order to get us to objectively look at our own work; the notion being that the left side was logical, objective, the right side was creative, subjective, and so I mapped that over the East/West politics of growing up on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The theory itself is bogus, but then so is division.”