Pillars is my ongoing series about people whose creative work has helped shape the way I imagine stories and worlds. This preview brings together the first 41 names. The six essays already published on albertchessa.com begin with Matt Nava, followed by Frank Frazetta, Hideo Kojima, Mike Pondsmith, Hayao Miyazaki and J. R. R. Tolkien. Mike Mignola begins the next group as Pillar 007, with the people below offering further starting points for the articles to come.
The series will eventually bring together 101 creative figures. Each of Quantumyth's 101 stories is a tribute to one of these people. I will reveal the names as the collection grows, leaving readers to discover for themselves which story honours which person.
The boundaries between my series are gentle. Art attends closely to visual practice, while Pillars considers the wider imaginative presence of a person's work. That may emerge through writing, illustration, direction, game design or the development of a world across different forms. Collaboration belongs within that picture: a recognisable creative vision often takes shape through the contributions of many people.
As with all my lists, these names carry no ranking. The numbers follow the sequence of the series, giving each article a place without placing one person's work above another's. Each entry here offers a hundred words towards a fuller discussion. I will keep adding to this preview as I choose the remaining names and return to the works that make me want to write about them.
001 Matt Nava
Matt Nava begins Pillars because his worlds make movement itself feel expressive. Through his art direction on Journey and his direction of Giant Squid's games, including ABZÛ and The Pathless, landscape becomes something understood through the body. A route, a creature or a change in light can carry an idea before a character explains it. My opening essay returns to that relationship between image and experience. Nava's influence reaches into the way I imagine a story unfolding through a place, with the audience discovering its scale, its rhythms and its emotional possibilities by choosing where and how to move next.
002 Frank Frazetta
Frank Frazetta gives an imagined world an immediate physical conviction. A figure seems to bear weight, an animal has force, and a distant landscape suggests dangers beyond the scene we can see. His paintings leave me interested in the life surrounding the central action, including the histories implied by a weapon, a ruin or a creature's body. The second Pillars essay explores that larger imaginative inheritance. Frazetta matters here through the stories his pictures allow me to imagine, and through the confidence with which a single composition can suggest an entire world continuing beyond the limits of the painted frame.
003 Hideo Kojima
Hideo Kojima makes the relationship between a story and its audience part of the work itself. Metal Gear and Death Stranding ask the player to inhabit ideas through movement, repetition, uncertainty and the strange intimacy of handling a controller. His interest in cinema sits alongside a willingness to let a game behave in ways a film cannot. As the third pillar, he gives me a way to consider authorship across writing, direction and collaboration. I want to explore how an invented world can address the person moving through it, making the act of participation part of what its story means.
004 Mike Pondsmith
Mike Pondsmith builds worlds in which a character's life depends on more than individual courage. Cyberpunk gives attention to work, money, technology and the institutions that shape what a person can do. A fictional setting becomes a place other people can enter, make choices within and help develop through play. My fourth Pillars essay follows that invitation into a shared world. Pondsmith's influence makes me think about the circumstances around a protagonist, including the people they rely upon and the freedoms they try to protect. His worlds leave room for an audience to become responsible for stories of its own.
005 Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao Miyazaki makes an imagined world feel inhabited through the ordinary actions of its people. Someone prepares food, repairs a machine, waits for transport or attends to a small task while a much larger story gathers around them. His films at Studio Ghibli allow wonder to coexist with work, uncertainty and the natural world's independence from human wishes. The fifth Pillars essay considers that continuity of attention. Miyazaki matters to me as a storyteller whose images and movement make room for life beyond the plot, and whose characters can remain compelling while learning that the world exceeds their first understanding.
006 J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien makes a story feel as though it has emerged from histories that exceed its telling. Language, landscape and remembered events give Middle-earth a depth that remains present even when the immediate task is small. His work connects invention with patient attention to words, names and the lives that might stand behind them. The sixth Pillars essay returns to that inheritance. Tolkien's influence reaches into the possibility of making a world coherent across many stories, while allowing loss, friendship and the ordinary desire for home to remain legible within the scale of its imagined ages and distances.
007 Mike Mignola
Mike Mignola begins the next chapter of Pillars with a world that feels older than its hero's understanding of it. Hellboy gathers folklore, ruined places and supernatural encounters around a character whose practical manner gives the uncanny an unusually human scale. The drawing and the storytelling share a precision: a shape, a pause or an apparently minor object can carry considerable weight. I want to explore that relationship across Mignola's work as an artist and writer. His place here concerns the making of a mythology that remains open to individual stories, and a protagonist whose choices matter within inherited expectations.
008 Tim Burton
Tim Burton gives a world its personality through the relationship between a figure and everything surrounding it. Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice offer different ways into a sensibility where architecture, costume and movement can make a character's discomfort visible. I am interested in the passage from his drawings into collaborative filmmaking, and in how a distinctive image becomes a place inhabited by performers. Burton's article will look at the tenderness and comedy within that visual language. His work makes me think about the stories available to people who struggle to fit the shapes that a community has already prepared for them.
009 George Lucas
George Lucas joins myth, visual invention and the practical work of making a film into a sustained creative enterprise. Star Wars gives its audience places and objects that seem to belong to a larger history, while its characters make that scale emotionally approachable. I want to consider the writer and filmmaker alongside the collaborators and institutions through which those worlds became possible. Lucas's article will explore how a personal imaginative direction survives the demands of production, revision and shared authorship. His influence concerns the ambition to make a story that can continue opening into other stories across generations of audiences.
010 James Gurney
James Gurney makes Dinotopia feel like a civilisation that could be visited, studied and gradually understood. His paintings give dinosaurs and people a shared environment, with buildings, customs and ordinary tasks helping the extraordinary become coherent. The books join illustration and writing with the curiosity of an observer taking notes in an unfamiliar place. I want to explore that method alongside his teaching and the practical research behind the pictures. Gurney's article will consider how a world gains credibility through its everyday arrangements, and how a beautiful image can invite the viewer to imagine living beyond the scene it presents.
011 Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg understands how a large event can become meaningful through a person's immediate response to it. Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park make scale, fear and wonder legible through faces, gestures and the careful placement of an audience within a scene. I want to look at that relationship between spectacle and attention, alongside the wider range of his filmmaking. Spielberg's article will consider how a story invites us to care before asking us to believe in something extraordinary. His influence reaches into the staging of an encounter, where a familiar human reaction can make an unfamiliar world suddenly feel near.
012 James Cameron
James Cameron connects an invented world to the physical demands of entering it. The Abyss and Avatar make environments feel like conditions a body must negotiate, with equipment, movement and danger giving the imagined place a practical reality. His filmmaking brings writing and visual design into close contact with technical development and collective problem solving. I want to examine how that ambition serves the experience of a story. Cameron's article will consider the relationship between an enormous production and a character's immediate needs, and how a world becomes convincing when its beauty and its difficulties belong to the same environment.
013 Amy Hennig
Amy Hennig makes character, performance and the structure of a game work upon one another. Her writing and direction across Legacy of Kain and Uncharted offer different ways to consider an adventure carried by a distinctive voice. Soul Reaver is especially interesting for the relationship between its shifting world and a protagonist trying to understand the forces shaping his life. I want to explore that connection between dramatic writing and the player's experience. Hennig's article will consider how a story maintains its personality through collaboration, and how dialogue can carry history, tension and changing loyalties without exhausting what remains unknown.
014 Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro gives monsters histories, needs and an emotional presence that complicates the first act of looking at them. Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy and Pinocchio connect visual invention with questions about cruelty, obedience and the possibility of care. His work moves between writing, filmmaking and the material pleasures of design, with individual objects often suggesting a much larger imaginative life. I want to explore how those interests become a coherent storytelling practice. Del Toro's article will consider the relationship between the creature and the world receiving it, and how an audience learns where to place its sympathy within that encounter.
015 C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis makes an imagined country accessible through a remarkably direct invitation. In The Chronicles of Narnia, a familiar object or an unexpected passage can open into a world where choices acquire a different weight. I am interested in the clarity of that storytelling, and in how an image can remain vivid while carrying ideas a reader may understand differently with age. Lewis's article will look at Narnia alongside the wider imagination behind his fiction and essays. His influence concerns the possibility of writing for immediate wonder while allowing a story's moral and emotional questions to continue unfolding afterwards.
016 Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll gives an invented world the unstable certainty of a rule that has almost begun to make sense. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass turn language, manners and ordinary expectations into sources of surprise. His work as a mathematician, photographer and writer makes him an especially interesting pillar for the relationship between observation and invention. I want to explore how nonsense develops its own local logic, and how a reader learns to inhabit it. Carroll's article will consider the freedom a story gains when words and social rules become things its characters must actively navigate and question.
017 L. Frank Baum
L. Frank Baum makes Oz a place that can keep expanding beyond the first journey through it. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz introduces a world through movement and companionship, giving unusual beings recognisable wishes and a destination that holds them together. The later books leave room for further countries, customs and encounters. I want to explore the relationship between that openness and the simplicity of an individual adventure. Baum's article will return to his writing alongside the many images and adaptations it has invited, considering how a world can remain welcoming while repeatedly offering its audience somewhere new to go.
018 J. M. Barrie
J. M. Barrie gives Neverland an appeal inseparable from the unease surrounding childhood and time. Peter Pan offers flight, games and adventure, while the possibility of leaving or being forgotten remains close to the pleasure. I want to explore that tension across the story's theatrical and literary forms, paying attention to how affection and loss occupy the same imagined place. Barrie's article will consider the world around Peter as well as the character himself. His place in Pillars concerns a fantasy that keeps changing as its audience grows older, revealing new feelings within images that once appeared much more straightforward.
019 Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson makes adventure depend on the difficult business of reading other people. Treasure Island gives a map and a voyage their attraction, then fills the journey with changing allegiances and characters whose intentions resist a child's first judgement. His work also extends into the divided identity of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I want to explore the storytelling energy linking those different forms of uncertainty. Stevenson's article will consider how atmosphere, voice and a carefully withheld motive keep a reader moving, and how an adventure becomes richer when its people exceed the roles initially assigned.
020 H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells makes a speculative idea alter the conditions of ordinary life. The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man ask what happens when an invention or an encounter changes humanity's place in the world. Their images remain vivid because the consequences reach into bodies, communities and habits of thought. For his Pillars article, I want to follow that connection between a striking premise and the society exposed by it. Wells offers a way of imagining the future that remains attentive to the present, including the assumptions a civilisation carries into its most extraordinary discoveries.
021 Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert makes an invented world answer to the forces sustaining it. In Dune, water, religion, ecology and political power shape the possibilities available to every character, including those who appear able to command history. Arrakis becomes understandable through relationships that extend far beyond a single adventure. I want to explore the care involved in making those relationships felt within a story, and the uncertainty surrounding the people who claim to understand them. Herbert's place in Pillars concerns the scale of a fictional system, and the attention it requires from an audience asked to consider the consequences of apparent triumph.
022 Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs gives a fictional world the momentum of a place continually opening before its visitor. The Barsoom stories carry John Carter across a Mars filled with competing societies, unfamiliar creatures and urgent adventures. I am interested in the way those stories create an appetite for further territory, and in the imaginative inheritance carried into later science fiction and fantasy. Burroughs's article will examine the machinery of that invitation, including its conventions and the assumptions of its time. His place here concerns the continuing power of an invented planet to make another horizon seem worth crossing within a story.
023 Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl makes an everyday setting vulnerable to sudden, extraordinary change. A factory, a classroom or a family home can become the site of a secret life whose rules are understood unevenly by children and adults. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG give that uncertainty a distinctive mixture of appetite, fear and comic invention. His Pillars article will explore the precision of the storytelling voice and the force of an unforgettable premise. I want to consider how Dahl turns a child's immediate concerns into the conditions of a fantasy, making language itself part of the adventure's pleasure.
024 Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter gives small lives the dignity of careful observation. In her animal stories, a garden, a path or a cupboard can hold a complete adventure, with the pictures attending closely to the living world from which the characters emerge. Her work as a writer and illustrator sits alongside interests in natural history and the preservation of the Lake District. That continuity makes her a compelling pillar for the relationship between imagination and stewardship. I want to explore how Potter's scale of attention allows an invented society to feel recognisable, and how a modest book can contain a lasting world.
025 Kenneth Grahame
Kenneth Grahame makes a fictional landscape meaningful through the routines and attachments of its inhabitants. The Wind in the Willows gives the river, the road and the home different emotional possibilities, while its characters continually negotiate the pull of adventure and familiar comforts. I want to look closely at the language that makes those places feel inhabited, and at the changes in feeling as the story moves between them. Grahame's article will consider friendship as part of a world's structure, allowing a reader to understand belonging through shared meals, returned visits and the difficult business of finding one's way home.
026 David Petersen
David Petersen builds Mouse Guard around the vulnerability and resourcefulness of its small inhabitants. A journey that might seem brief at human scale becomes an undertaking shaped by weather, predators and the need to find shelter. His writing and illustration give that premise a social life, with settlements, duties and disagreements making the world feel collectively inhabited. I want to explore the relationship between the intimacy of his drawings and the larger history they suggest. Petersen's article will consider how a change of scale creates fresh storytelling possibilities, and how courage becomes legible through the practical work of protecting others.
027 Larry MacDougall
Larry MacDougall makes Gwelf feel like a country whose inhabitants have occupations, histories and concerns beyond the page. His animal characters inhabit a fantasy landscape with the material presence of fur, cloth, timber and weather. The paintings invite a closer look at the arrangements of everyday life, allowing an unfamiliar society to emerge through visible details. I want to explore how his writing and illustration develop that invitation across the books. MacDougall's place in Pillars concerns the patient construction of a world one might keep returning to, discovering another dwelling, another traveller or another story within its woods and settlements.
028 Tim Schafer
Tim Schafer gives an unusual premise enough character to become an inhabited world. Grim Fandango, Psychonauts and Brütal Legend each establish a distinctive relationship between their visual language, their humour and the concerns of the people moving through them. I want to consider the writing alongside the collaborative work of directing games, including the room his worlds make for individual performances and unexpected details. Schafer's article will explore how comedy helps a setting acquire emotional depth. His influence concerns the freedom to begin with an eccentric idea and develop its consequences until the audience can recognise a life within it.
029 Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott makes a world persuasive through the things its inhabitants have learned to take for granted. In Alien and Blade Runner, working environments, worn surfaces and the arrangement of light suggest systems extending beyond the immediate scene. The camera allows those details to become part of a character's circumstances. I want to explore that visual judgement alongside the collective design work through which a film acquires its physical identity. Scott's article will consider how atmosphere carries information, and how an imagined future can feel lived in through the ordinary evidence of labour, habit and a place's accumulated human use.
030 Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig gives close attention to the stories people use to understand their own lives. Lady Bird, Little Women and Barbie approach belonging, aspiration and authorship through different settings, with humour and performance allowing complicated feelings to remain active within a scene. Her work across acting, writing and directing makes her a pillar for the relationship between a personal voice and a shared production. I want to explore how structure changes the way an audience understands a character's choices. Gerwig's article will consider the imaginative freedom involved in revisiting familiar material and finding another way for its people to speak.
031 George R. R. Martin
George R. R. Martin gives an imagined history the instability of events experienced by people who understand only part of them. A Song of Ice and Fire moves among characters whose loyalties, circumstances and memories produce different accounts of the same world. I am interested in how that structure allows power to be felt at several scales, from a household to a continent. Martin's article will explore the relationship between worldbuilding and the individual viewpoint. His place in Pillars concerns a fictional society that remains difficult to master, asking a reader to reconsider what seemed certain when another person speaks.
032 Fumito Ueda
Fumito Ueda makes a relationship something the player learns through action. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian give movement, hesitation and physical proximity an expressive role, allowing trust or uncertainty to develop without constant explanation. Their enormous spaces hold the traces of purposes that remain partly beyond our understanding. I want to explore how that restraint supports an experience with a lasting presence. Ueda's article will consider the connection between design and attachment, including the small actions through which a companion becomes particular, and the responsibility a player can feel toward another being within an unfamiliar world.
033 Hironobu Sakaguchi
Hironobu Sakaguchi gives a fantasy adventure its direction through the lives of the people undertaking it. His work with Final Fantasy and Mistwalker brings imaginative settings into contact with friendship, loss and the practical rhythms of a roleplaying game. Fantasian offers another way to consider that relationship through its handcrafted diorama environments. I want to explore the continuity of his storytelling interests across changing production methods and collaborators. Sakaguchi's article will consider how a long journey maintains emotional coherence, allowing a party of characters to become the audience's way of understanding a world whose scale continues to expand around them.
034 Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto makes discovery begin with a clear, inviting action. The worlds associated with Mario and The Legend of Zelda become understandable as the player moves, experiments and notices a possibility in the surroundings. I want to explore that relationship between curiosity and design, including the collaborative development through which an idea becomes a game people can inhabit. Miyamoto's article will consider how a simple interaction supports a much larger imaginative experience. His place in Pillars concerns the care given to an audience's first steps, and the confidence that play itself can carry the pleasure of entering somewhere new together.
035 Jenova Chen
Jenova Chen makes the emotional possibilities of play central to the design of a shared experience. Flower, Journey and Sky: Children of the Light give movement, encounter and the surrounding environment a role in how a player feels. His work with thatgamecompany interests me for the care given to communication, including what people can express when familiar forms of dialogue are limited. I want to explore how those decisions shape attention and connection. Chen's article will consider the making of experiences in which another person's presence changes the meaning of a journey, even when we know little about them beforehand.
036 Cory Barlog
Cory Barlog makes the scale of a mythological world answer to the immediate difficulty of a relationship. God of War, particularly the 2018 game, gives Kratos's journey with Atreus an intimacy carried through performance, movement and the time they spend together. I want to examine how that focus survives within a production filled with combat, spectacle and inherited expectations. Barlog's article will consider direction as the work of maintaining an emotional intention across many creative contributions. His place in Pillars concerns the possibility of returning to an established character and finding a different story through the responsibilities he must learn.
037 Ken Levine
Ken Levine makes a fictional society speak through its architecture, its routines and the choices offered to the player. BioShock and BioShock Infinite place their ideas within settings whose promises become increasingly difficult to reconcile with lived experience. I want to explore the relationship between that environmental storytelling and the systems through which an audience participates. Levine's article will consider the expectations a game creates around agency, including the moment a familiar instruction begins to seem questionable. His influence concerns the design of worlds in which looking carefully at the surroundings can change our understanding of the story we inhabit.
038 Stephen King
Stephen King gives an imagined horror the social texture of a place people have made their home. Derry and Castle Rock accumulate relationships, memories and ordinary routines that allow an extraordinary threat to enter a recognisable world. The Dark Tower extends that imaginative reach across connected stories and changing landscapes. I want to explore the continuity between those scales, and the attention to character that makes both possible. King's article will consider how a setting acquires a memory, allowing later stories to encounter the traces of earlier lives, and how the familiar can remain unsettling after an immediate danger passes.
039 Luc Besson
Luc Besson gives an imagined world the energy of a place already crowded with other people's lives. The Fifth Element makes its future tangible through costumes, transport, performances and the collisions between them. His work across writing, direction and production also extends into the miniature fantasy of Arthur and the Invisibles, adapted from his own novel. I want to explore how those different scales support a recognisable visual imagination. Besson's article will consider the collaboration behind a densely populated screen, and how a story can keep an immediate human desire legible within the movement and invention of its surrounding world.
040 J. K. Rowling
J. K. Rowling makes an invented world familiar through the rhythms of growing up within it. The Harry Potter books give Hogwarts a calendar, shared rituals and everyday frustrations, allowing extraordinary events to acquire meaning through the lives of its pupils. I am interested in how the series expands its history while changing what its characters understand about the adults around them. Rowling's article will explore the relationship between that long narrative structure and the details that make a place memorable. Her place in Pillars concerns the writing of a world that can deepen as its first readers grow older.
041 H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft makes an invented history emerge through the fragments someone has managed to preserve. The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness assemble documents, discoveries and partial explanations into encounters with a universe beyond human understanding. I want to explore how that method gives unseen things a presence, and how recurring places and imagined books connect otherwise separate stories. Lovecraft's article will consider the relationship between the archive and the unknown. His place in Pillars concerns the construction of a mythology whose scale becomes apparent through the limits of what any individual narrator can fully explain.
This preview will keep growing. The longer articles will make room for individual works, creative processes and the connections that become visible when I spend more time with them. For now, these are the next places I want to explore in Pillars.
Sources and further viewing
Biographical details and project credits are linked below. The discussion of each creator's work reflects my own response to it.
Matt Nava: Official artist portfolio; Published Pillar 001.
Frank Frazetta: Official Frazetta Art Museum; Published Pillar 002.
Hideo Kojima: Official Kojima Productions history; Published series sequence.
Mike Pondsmith: Official R. Talsorian Games history; Published Pillar 004.
Hayao Miyazaki: Official Studio Ghibli website; Published Pillar 005.
J. R. R. Tolkien: Official Tolkien Estate; Published Pillar 006.
Mike Mignola: Official artist website; Publisher biography.
Tim Burton: Official artist website; Official exhibition.
George Lucas: Official Lucasfilm history; American Film Institute profile.
James Gurney: Official artist website; Official biography and books.
Steven Spielberg: Official Amblin filmmaker profile; National Endowment for the Arts biography.
James Cameron: Official Disney filmmaker profile; Official Avatar film page.
Amy Hennig: Lucasfilm profile and career credits.
Guillermo del Toro: British Film Institute career profile; BFI film season.
C. S. Lewis: Official C. S. Lewis website; C. S. Lewis Foundation biography.
Lewis Carroll: Lewis Carroll Society biography; Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
L. Frank Baum: International Wizard of Oz Club biography; International Wizard of Oz Club.
J. M. Barrie: J. M. Barrie literary archive; Great Ormond Street Peter Pan history.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Robert Louis Stevenson literary resource; Poetry Foundation biography.
H. G. Wells: Penguin Random House author biography; Hachette author biography.
Frank Herbert: Official Dune author biography; Publisher author profile.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Official Edgar Rice Burroughs website; Official Barsoom website.
Roald Dahl: Official Roald Dahl website; Roald Dahl Story Company.
Beatrix Potter: Official Peter Rabbit biography; National Trust life and legacy.
Kenneth Grahame: Hachette author biography; Penguin Random House author biography.
David Petersen: Official Mouse Guard website; Official creator and series biography.
Larry MacDougall: Official Gwelf books and artwork.
Tim Schafer: Official Double Fine biography; Double Fine studio history.
Ridley Scott: Official RSA Films filmmaker profile; Scott Free Productions history.
Greta Gerwig: Festival de Cannes filmmaker biography; Official Lady Bird film page.
George R. R. Martin: Official author autobiography; Publisher author profile.
Fumito Ueda: Official genDESIGN website; Official Fumito Ueda interview.
Hironobu Sakaguchi: PlayStation interview on Final Fantasy and Mistwalker.
Shigeru Miyamoto: Official Nintendo Zelda interview; Nintendo interview with Shigeru Miyamoto.
Jenova Chen: Official creator website; Official biography.
Cory Barlog: PlayStation interview on God of War.
Ken Levine: Official Ghost Story Games biography; Official studio background.
Stephen King: Official author biography; Official Dark Tower website.
Luc Besson: Festival de Cannes filmmaker profile; Deauville festival career biography.
J. K. Rowling: Official author biography; Bloomsbury author and books.
H. P. Lovecraft: H. P. Lovecraft Archive biography; Lovecraft's fiction and texts.
