My Creative Hero: How 80s and 90s Pop Culture Shaped Calvin Innes

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I found my earliest creative heroes not in advertising, but within the pages of comic books and the frames of sci-fi movies and TV shows. These were my foundational inspirations, fuelling my imagination and guiding my career, initially as an illustrator and designer and then as a creative director and strategist.

Now, as creative director of NERD London, a pop culture-driven creative agency these influences are perhaps more apparent than ever. These stories, characters, and worlds ignited something in me that has continued to influence my work today, and they’ve become a part of my creative DNA.

Long before I ever opened any kind of design software, comic books were my entry point into the creative world. Comics, for me, were so much more than just a form of entertainment. They were an art form that fused storytelling with dynamic visuals.

They would teach me about bold and innovative design, and complex, engaging storytelling. I would pour over the pages of Batman, Judge Dredd, and Spawn, captivated by the dark undertones and the complexity of these characters and their worlds. The influence of comic books on me as a painfully shy, yet fiercely creative child, was profound.

Batman in particular had a lasting impact on me. The duality of Bruce Wayne and Batman, the dark shadows of Gotham City, and the morally ambiguous villains created a sense of tension and drama that I, like so many other fans, found fascinating.

The visuals, from the likes of Frank Miller, Tony Daniels, Jim Lee, Sean Murphy, Kelly Jones, and later Greg Capullo, with their noir-inspired shadows, towering cityscapes, and minimalist colour schemes, taught me how design could evoke mood and emotion. 

Exploring the work of these seminal artists, and creating my own comic book art helped shape my understanding of how to create atmosphere and tone in my work as a designer.

Similarly, Judge Dredd, with its gritty art style and exaggerated, almost grotesque figures were bold and unapologetic, often breaking the very rules I had begun to learn when it came to visual language and composition. And of course, learning to break the rules is as important as learning the rules in the first place.

Then there was Spawn, an absolute visual feast of macabre beauty. The pages of Todd McFarlane’s intricate and generally chaotic comic books were a revelation to me. The way that Spawn blended horror, fantasy, and superhero genres into a cohesive whole, on reflection, demonstrated the power of cross-pollination in creative work.

Spawn, more than most comic book titles, resonated with the part of me that loves to challenge conventions and embrace the strange.

While comic books opened my eyes to visual storytelling and influenced both my illustrations and designs, it was the films and TV of the 80s and 90s that ignited my passion for worldbuilding. Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars and Terminator were not just movies to me. Each was a fully realised world that felt immersive, tangible, and real.

Their visual language had a raw edge, combining future tech with dystopian grime, which fascinated me and shaped my understanding of how environments influence narrative, and led to me beginning to experiment with making my own short films.

Ridley Scott’s Alien was a particular creative touchstone. H.R. Giger's biomechanical designs for the Xenomorphs were unlike anything I'd seen before, an eerie combination of organic and artificial elements that created a sense of horror. The film's offered a bounty of texture, contrast, and visual tension.

Still, to this day, when I approach creative campaigns or brand work, I often think back to how those visuals played off each other, creating a sense of urgency and emotional depth.

Equally influential for me as a young creative mind, trying to find his feet, was Blade Runner. It presented a world where neon-lit streets were shrouded in constant rain, towering skyscrapers contrasted with the grime of street-level life, and humans and replicants existed in a blurred moral landscape.

The film's cyberpunk aesthetic, dark, moody, yet punctuated with striking colour, felt plausible, gritty, and tactile and influenced a huge amount of my creative work as a student.

If comic books and sci-fi cinema were my entry points into design and storytelling, the broader pop culture landscape of the 80s and 90s, things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Ghostbusters, and Knight Rider, were the rocket fuel for my imagination.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a perfect combination of irreverence and action. The character designs were bold and iconic, distinct silhouettes and colours that made each turtle instantly recognisable. The world they inhabited, a dark and dirty New York City, was also a playground of possibilities.

From a design perspective, this juxtaposition of grit and cartoonish energy as well as the bold, simplistic colour choices makes the characters iconic, timeless, and open for reinvention to fit with new audiences without losing any of the core appeal.

Transformers is a property that has stayed with me since childhood. I'm probably even more of a fan now than I was as a child, and now as my own children are equally invested, I have new reasons to love the IP.

The concept of characters being more than meets the eye, robots that could shift and change into entirely new forms, and the mix of emotion, action and pure entertainment makes for a timeless mix. Some of my first drawings as a child were of Optimus Prime and Ratchet, and without a doubt the ongoing narrative of the TV show had a big impact on me growing up.

As the creative director at JvM NERD London, I now get to take these early influences and apply them to my daily work. I’ve found that the worlds I immersed myself in during the 80s and 90s still provide fertile ground for creative exploration. More than just influencing the ‘nerd' and fandom aspects of my work, these influences have become a key part of my creative process.

Working in a pop culture-driven agency allows me to channel the same passion I had as a kid into meaningful, engaging campaigns for businesses and brands looking to explore the space, and capitalise on a rapidly growing arena. And in a way, it feels like I'm completing a full circle, creating work that’s inspired by the very things that inspired me.

Like all creatives, I have drawn influence from a thousand different areas and absorbed information and inspiration from countless books, films, music, artists, designers, commercials and everything else in between, but the importance of comics, TV and films to my creative journey has been immense.

These early heroes, Batman, Judge Dredd, The Ghostbusters, Spawn, Transformers, the Turtles, and all the rest, influenced my visual style and have played an important part in teaching me about world building and fandoms.

Whether through comic panels, film frames, or Saturday morning cartoons, they helped me understand the power of visual storytelling.