The Five Families.

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come out of nowhere. It can be elusive when you need it most. Or, in this case, it can linger in the back of your mind, so far in the background noise, that it will sneak up and insert itself into your work before you realize what’s happened.

I only just realized that’s happened here, in Star Power & The Life Smugglers, with the five remaining Crime Families of Axiosis… because there are also five crime families in one of my favorite films, The Godfather, to the point where they are distinctly referred to as “the five families.”

I had completely forgotten that was a term I’d heard before. When I was working on the initial scripts and setups for this storyline, I made five Adraxee families because five is my favorite number. Over the years I’ve put the number five in many of my stories, so I simply thought I was doing it again here. “The five families” was ringing a little too well and I assumed it was because of its alliterative nature. Then, while I was rewatching parts of The Godfather for inspiration, I heard the term in the movie and it struck me like a mob ambush. It had been there in the back of my mind, all along, waiting for its chance.

And this has happened to me once before! Many years ago, when I was working on my previous comic, I needed to come up with a last name for a seer named Dominic. My brain once again gravitated towards something of an alliterative nature, so I came up with Dominic Deegan… completely forgetting that I’d heard that name before, growing up in New York, living near the Major Deegan Expressway. I thought I was being clever, but I was really just recalling the name of a street.

We absorb so much that we can forget what we’ve seen or heard, but it’s nice to know my notoriously scattered brain sometimes tucks things away, just in case I’ll need it for later.