Delaware’s Mike Hinson, now based in Brooklyn, has a knack for storytelling of the bizarre kind. Or, in the case of his recently published comic Moonshine, his storytelling stems from older generations of his family detailing the many ways one used to “turn up” back in the day. His weird, colorful stories bring to mind another denizen of strange stories — the TV show Adventure Time. Hinson says he’s definitely a fan of the show but says his inspiration to draw came from another cartoon. Whatever the inspiration may come from, one thing is certain: Hinson’s mixture of the playful and the absurd is captivating, and his efforts also come across as a nod to the absurdity of real life. A few panels of “Moonshine” focus on credit cards and (spoiler alert!) arms end up getting eaten off. For this conversation though, Hinson took a trip down memory lane to the possible fables, possible truths that inspired “Moonshine.”
When was the first time you realized, “Oh I can do this!”
Probably when I was a lot younger, I used to watch a lot of cartoons and stuff. A lot of the Japanese cartoons like Pokémon, Dragonball Z. I [started off] drawing characters from that, scenes, and then made my own stuff. I just continued on from that and started doing my own stuff.
That’s funny because I don’t really see that kind of influence. Your stuff reminds me of Adventure Time a lot but obviously you’re too old to have been inspired by Adventure Time.
That’s still one of my favorite shows.
Speaking of TV, I noticed that TV and music place largely in your art. Where does that come from?
Yeah, I include a lot of pop culture stuff. Music [because] I feel like if I wasn’t doing art I’d be a musician. The best way of tieing the two together is to draw music-related stuff. [As for] TV, I have a lot of favorite TV shows. Anything I like or enjoy, I’ll want to draw something about it or try to incorporate a reference from it into my work somehow.
So if you were working on music what would you be doing specifically?
I used to mess around with production. Making beats and DJing. I never got extremely good at either. I always thought it’d be something I’d try out a bit. I’ve got a lot of friends who are rappers and musicians, it’d be fun to try out.
Where did you get your inspiration for “Moonshine”?
All of it is based off of family stories.They’re obviously exaggerated, just so I could make them super visual, get super funny stuff out of it. They’re all based on stories family and friends back home told me. I just took a bunch of those and made them really ridiculous.
So was there a specific story that inspired you?
My favorite story is the one that I got the idea for the title “Moonshine” from. It’s a story that my Pop-pop would always tell but nobody was actually sure how true it actually was [laughs].
The story goes that when he and his friends were younger and not able to legally drink alcohol, to get drinks they would drive out to this random forest where there was an old tree stump. Apparently all they had to do was find the stump and put the money down on the stump for however much liquor they were looking to get. Once they left and drove back home a bag of liquor would just magically be waiting for them on the front step of the house.
I’m not sure how factual it was [laughs]. My mom even remembers him telling it to her when she was younger so who knows? It was always a really cool and visual story to me and I had wanted to illustrate it for awhile. It ended up being the inspiration for the whole book.
Interview by Alex Martinez. Follow her on Twitter @xxalexm.
