Recommended Reading

The Foglios have named the creators and their many works of literature, animation, graphical storytelling and art as influences on both their personal creativity and Girl Genius in particular. Here is a partial list of those influences, how to find some of them, and further recommendations from fellow readers and fans:

Literary

 * Jane Austen wrote witty and satiric novels mocking the popular subjects of Georgian Britain. Her comedies of manners have only increased in popularity and regard in the roughly two centuries since they were first written.  The novel Castle of Wolfenbach, mentioned in Austen's Northanger Abbey, is the source of the family name of Baron Klaus Wulfenbach and his son.
 * H. Rider Haggard's writing, especially She and King Solomon's Mines, is mentioned as "incredibly influential" on the structure and style of Girl Genius. Written in the late 1800s, Haggard's hero Allan Quatermain, in a series of "blood and thunder and adventure and dashing around various parts of the Empire" novels, encountered immortal queens, native chieftains, bloodthirsty cults and fabulous lost treasures.
 * Kenneth Robeson was actually the house name for a collection of authors who produced "Doc Savage" stories for Street and Smith Publications; the most frequent "Kenneth Robeson" was Lester Dent. Doc Savage has been mentioned as a parallel to Klaus Wulfenbach (which had been noticed, sans interview, by  than ).
 * Jules Verne
 * H.G. Wells

Artistic

 * Vaugn Bode
 * Frank Kelly Freas
 * Wendy & Richard Pini
 * Charles Schultz
 * Osamu Tezuka is often credited as the "Father of Anime", and is often considered the Japanese equivalent to Walt Disney. He created two series which, once imported to the U.S., influenced a whole generation of comic and animation artists: Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion.

Animation/Film

 * Tex Avery
 * Chuck Jones
 * Studio Ghibli

Literary

 * Edgar Rice Burroughs
 * Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, must, of course, be cited as an obvious inspiration for large elements of the setting and atmosphere chosen, in addition to a major category of constructs such as we see in "Agatha Heterodyne and the Electric Coffin".

Animation/Film

 * The Adventures of Jules Verne - "What if all those stories Jules Verne wrote were based on his own experiences?" An impoverished French law student with a fantastic imagination and visions of the future is swept up into the efforts of British Crown agents battling an immortal construct's plans for world domination.
 * Firefly - although this is set in a far future where Earth has been rendered uninhabitable for the most part, the juxtaposition of frontier culture and space-enabled technology resonates with the steampunk/gaslamp &aelig;sthetic.
 * The Wild, Wild West - this series was mentioned by Kaja in one interview, but would be recommended even without the Foglios hearty appreciation. Created in the mid-1960s as a James Bond pastiche set in a Western context, it can now be retroactively identified as the first real and original American steampunk/gaslamp fantasy television series (as opposed to, say, a Verne or Wells adaptation for the small screen).