Hellsing and Trigun both feature protagonists who wear red and wield large handguns. That's where the similarities between the manga and animated series start to end - although Kouta Hirano (pictured), Hellsing's creator, has quipped that Trigun's Vash the Stampede may have been something of an inspiration for his Alucard. Hirano chose huge firearms for vampire Alucard because of vampires' fictional strengths. "When you become a vampire, you get extreme strength that gives you the freedom to haul big guns like a .50- caliber machine gun," Hirano said through an interpreter at a Sakura Con interview session. Hirano further chose a human-appearing vampire for Hellsing, rather than any other monster or demon, because people are attracted to vampires in a way they aren't attracted to traditional Japanese oni or even old-style movie monsters such as Frankenstein's monster. "But think about a vampire," said Hirano. "He's immortal, physically strong ...he doesn't have the down points so much, more so than with the Japanese monsters. There's nothing like a vampire. It's quite simple to see how people are drawn by a vampire's charm. They have everything that humans don't have, drawn into one."

Trigun has no vampires, but it does have more guns, carried by more people, than Hellsing. That's appropriate for a series based on the legends of the American West, a place that gave birth to the slogan that "Samuel Colt made all men equal." Yasuhiro Nightow (pictured), Trigun's creator, said about the firearms in Trigun that "A gun does not necessarily work as a tool. It could serve as a metaphor for power and a way to balance that power. The name `peacemaker' on the gun (the Colt .45-caliber revolver widely used on the frontier in the late 19th century) is ironic, but it's the sort of thing that I found n the use of the gun. It's all entertainment - if you're only focusing on the bad part, that tales the fun out of it." The guns are part of Trigun's fun for Nightow, especially the gimmicked guns hidden in the large cross carried by the jackleg preacher Nicholas D. Wolfwood. A western movie that featured a gunman who carried his weapon in a guitar case was Nightow's inspiration for Wolfwood's cross. "I love movies with a lot of gimmicks and tricks and hidden mechanisms. Even if the plot of the movie isn't much, I like the gimmicks very much, so I deliberately work that into my stories." And, Wolfwood got to be a preacher as a way of dealing with his past. "He had some very tough times, and as a way of dealing with that, religion might be seen as a shortcut of recovering a balanced view of his world - that's how religion was used to make up Wolfwood's character."