SR 1 PAGE FIVE

The angriest page in the whole dang book? Probably!

That whole “10 Commandments” thing is sorta painfully teenagery, right? (The third commandment just screams “freaked out Catholic kid.”) Definitely reflected how I was thinking about things at the time, though. And Sera’s dismissive comment about the list reflects my own growing sensation that… man… I should probably be maturing past all this at age 23, right?

(To all my other social-phobic late bloomers out there: I SEE you. I HEAR you. I’m SORRY for both seeing and hearing you.)

It’s not that there’s anything specifically wrong about 16-year-old Sera’s list. It’s just that it’s sort of… obvious? “Stick to basic animal sensations and stop asking questions, drone,” has been standard ruling class messaging forever. The world’s always been creepy like that. Identifying that creepiness feels insightful when you’re 16, but as you get older a more important question starts poking at you: How do I respond to the creepiness?

Sera responds by making some political art here, but she keeps destroying it because it feels so tired. Just underlining the same old creepiness everyone’s already aware of. She’s not saying anything new and certainly not fixing anything. So the frustration bubbles and bubbles and BOOM: hole in the canvas.

I feel this frustration pretty much all the time! (Who doesn’t?) I don’t think there’s anything wrong with spending your art career reiterating universally understood truths. We need to keep reassuring each other we’re not crazy. But the frustration in trying to say something NEW or effect a genuine change is real.

Gotta be especially frustrating when you have actual magic powers to work with.

But, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in the unforgettable(?) 2000 classic The 6th Day, “Enough philosophy!”

SR 1 PAGE SIX

Our first clear look at Sera! There she is! This drawing of her went through a dozen different versions, and I’m still not sure I made the right call. A teacher at CalArts once stressed the importance of character introductions, so this moment was a very big deal for me. I agonized over this drawing for days, desperate to get people’s first-ever look at Serenity Rose exactly, perfectly, precisely, absolutely right. 

(Serenity Rose, of course, also appears on the cover.)

This is the classic “puppy nose no mouth” book one Sera, which is still a lot of readers’ favorite. More huggable, I guess? Years ago somebody told me they thought her nose was a mouth making sort of a permanent “OOOOO” face. Feel free to believe this yourself!

“Huggable Sera” is just one of several dozen versions of her I’ve gone through since that very first sketch at CalArts in 1998:

Just try hugging that one.

I bumbled around trying to find just the right Sera for over a decade, and I’m still not sure I ever 100% found her. She’s pretty much forever a work in progress. You know those artists who can draw their own characters with rapid pinpoint precision every single time? I live in burning envy of them.

TECHNICAL CORNER: Page six has a lot of white pencil work over Sharpie marker. And LORD ALMIGHTY did that not scan well. Printed even worse. “White on black” was really tricky to pull off with the printing technology of the time (might still be the case), so probably 60-70% of the texture was lost by the time the comic rolled off the press. I kept trying, though!

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYBODY. What are you doing for the big spookin’ day? Halloween is my wedding anniversary, so Ami and I are going to a fancy cheese place to celebrate. That doesn’t sound scary enough? What if I told you… THE CHEESE IS HAUNTED??

As a board-certified Spooky Person I should probably make some kind of spooky recommendations to spook up your spooky spookday, huh? Let’s make them comic recs, because that’s what I do…

All you cool people have probably already checked out all the Sandmen and Swamps Things and various Tales from various Crypts… And you’ve read every Junji Ito story, right? NO YOU HAVEN’T BECAUSE NO ONE HAS. There are four billion Junji Ito stories! All those collections kind of blur together, but they’re all good. If you’re looking for a place to start, you can’t do better than Uzumaki. His Frankenstein adaptation is phenomenal, too. (The only Frankenstein’s monster I’ve ever seen who’s genuinely upsetting to look at!)

If you’re looking for a goofy good time on Halloween, Count Crowley is super-fun (especially if, like me, you’re way into horror hosts). And a re-read of Scary Godmother is always in order… Uh…

Hey, you know what? Let me just hold out my whole tub of candy and you trick-or-treaters can grab whatever you want: Harrow County, Something Is Killing the Children, House of Penance, Through the Woods, Black Hole, Behind You, PTSD Radio, The Me You Love in the Dark, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters… UGH, TOO MANY…

You could also check out ELDRITCH! and IT’S NOT SCARY! I’ve heard good things about those.

NEXT WEEK: SICK MORNING.