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Imaginos Workshop is a creative engine featuring a diverse group of creators. Our media ranges from comics to podcasts to scripts. As our company motto simply states, "We Make Cool $h!t!"
Creator spotlight
Ervin Johnson
Joe Cain is a writer and letterer whose lifelong love of comics made storytelling less a career choice and more an inevitability. Largely self-taught, he picked up lettering out of necessity to meet a deadline and never looked back. He developed it into a craft he approaches with the same care he brings to his writing.
He is currently developing Paragon Panic, a Super Sentai-inspired superhero comedy set in an expansive world he hopes to one day see animated, alongside several other projects including an urban fantasy novella series, a fantasy comedy, and a sci-fi political thriller.
A former comic shop veteran, Joe credits those years with broadening his understanding of the medium in ways that continue to shape his voice as a creator.
Q: How did you get started writing and lettering comics?
A: I've been a fan of comics most of my life and have always told stories to one extent or another without formal training, so writing comics was kind of an inevitability. But lettering was actually more out of necessary as we needed our books lettered for an upcoming deadline, so I lettered my own story for Imaginos Plus that year and really took a liking to it.
Q: Who are some of your creative influences?
A: Though I don't draw as much as I used to, I am still influenced by artists as much as writers. So, between comics, manga, movies, and anime, Brian Michael Bendis, Kevin Smith, Akira Toriyama, Mark Dudley, Olivier Coipel, Matt Fraction, Pepe Larraz, Masami Obari, Edgar Wright, Satoshi Kon, Stuart Immonen, and Hideaki Anno.
Q: You are working on a Super Sentai influence Super Hero Comedy, Paragon Panic.
A: Where do you want to see this property go? Personally, I'd like the chance to see it develop and grow beyond the main title. I've got a large world turning outside of the setting of Paragon City and I'd love to show more of it to people. If we're talking about going beyond comics, I'd love to see Paragon Panic animated some day.
Q: You're big into Anime and Manga. What are some of your favorites and why?
A: I could go on for hours and list entirely too many, but I'll keep it to 3. Dragon Ball is an all-time classic and Akira Toriyama was a huge overall inspiration for most of my early years, but it also taught me about interpersonal character dynamics in a way that hadn't clicked until then and that a story can survive a major pivot if the execution is strong enough. Junk: Record of the Last Hero was the first time I got to see a dark, more adult story within a tokusatsu style of world-building, helping me work my way over the self-confidence hump of being such a big of fan of that form of superhero storytelling. And a new favorite is Jujutsu Kaisen because of the insane depth of its world-building from a political and power-system perspective as neither side suffers as the story progresses and there's always still new things to learn.
Q: What advice would you go back and give 20 year old Joe Cain as it relates to being a creative?
A: Don't try to tell a story that will impress someone else. Take what you're learning and apply it to your own voice. It'll take time and folks may not be as interested in what you're making but you'll be happier with what you're making.
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