Ah... Grassblades, bless its grumpy little heart, is pretty much everything I like, chucked in a blender and set to 'high'.
Partly, it's all the samurai comics I've read over the years - Vagabond, Blade of the Immortal, Usagi Yojimbo, Lone Wolf and Cub, J P Kalonji's 365 Samurai And A Few Bowls of Rice and to some extent, Bleach (specifically the characters Zaraki and Yachiru; I stopped following Bleach a while ago), but also my love of melodramatic Asian costume-drama movies - preferably ones featuring Toshiro Mifune in full samurai getup.
And also stuff like Hellboy - which inspired some of the structure of the comic itself (overarching story mixed with shorter, more episodic pieces) - and the videogame Okami (to which Grassblades owes a lot of its meandering through the landscape, and the gloomy atmosphere of the demon-haunted settings).
Then there's more general stuff - my fondness for the contrast between big, scary-looking characters and tiny, cute ones, my wish to write a parent-child relationship between two characters who aren't quite fit for their parts, doing something on the themes of recovering from trauma and dealing with guilt, etc., etc.
All the things I love, plus a bit of extra stuff sprinkled on top!