SR 1 PAGE TWENTY-SEVEN

“Note: Serenity is not a teenager.”

Everybody thought Serenity was a teenager. She’s not, but the assumption isn’t crazy. In the first issue we see Sera’s a college student, but she could theoretically be 18 or 19. (In issue four she mentions she’s 22.)

People think Sera’s younger than she is because, A, she’s really short, and B, ALL of my characters look like giant babies. This damnable cuteness gets in everything! Simply will not wash out! When I drew an issue of Fables for Vertigo back in 2007, a reader complained that I made all the characters look too young. I hadn’t even noticed! The adult ones were taller than the kid ones, right? What more did this lunatic want? FATHER TIME BEARDS ON EVERYBODY????

????????????????????

At first, some people even thought Sera was supposed to be a small child. Around the time issue one came out, I read an interview with Roman Dirge, the creator of a popular SLG series about a cute little dead girl called Lenore. The interviewer asked him if he was bummed about all the “spooky kid” Lenore ripoffs coming out at the time, and specifically called out Serenity Rose as one of the ripoffs. 

This was baffling! Sera is TWENTY-TWO. How could anyone confuse my book for one about a small corpse child? It’s like comparing Peanuts to Tank Girl! 

But then it occurred to me… If all you’d ever seen was the cover of issue one, Serenity Rose does kind of look like a Lenore clone. Giant, round, paper-white head, eyes ringed in black, general gothiness. If you never cracked the cover, you could easily think this is just another book about a cute little dead girl. Obviously this interviewer hadn’t cracked the cover.

Roman, to his credit, vouched for me in that interview. We had recently worked together on Invader ZIM, so he knew all about Serenity’s history and what the comic was really all about. I wonder if the interviewer ever went back and gave SR a shot. Hope he did. Imagine him now, pulling issue one from the shadows of his Local Comic Shop’s goth ghetto, cracking it open, flipping through the pages a bit, finally concluding… “Oh, I get it. It’s about a teenager.”

He quickly leaves without purchasing a thing.

SR 1 PAGE TWENTY-EIGHT

Loved writing these little history dumps. I’m a huge history nerd. For example: I can name every ruler of England since the Norman conquest, complete with key biographical details, despite being not the slightest bit English. Did you know King Henry I’s cause of death was officially recorded as “a surfeit of lampreys?” Party animal ate too many weird fish and died. LEGEND-CLASS.

700 years later U.S. president Zachary Taylor dropped dead from eating too many cherries. Cherries. This feeble country simply cannot compete. Shambles.

I sometimes wonder if I missed my calling. Occasionally I imagine myself poring over old documents in some dank basement archive and it just feels correct. But then I realize I like making stuff up way too much to ever fully embrace the historian life. “Making stuff up” is generally frowned upon in serious historian circles. (For now.)

Building your own worlds is fun! It can also be a little bit of a trap, though? Sometimes people spend all their time constructing intricate worlds with complex rules and social dynamics, then forget they need to fit characters and a story somewhere in there. I like to build juuuust enough world to get the characters started, then figure out the rest as we go along. Sort of like the characters are conjuring their environment as they move through it. All of Crestfallen is built around the idea “What sort of place would this person, Serenity Rose, find most challenging… And also, maybe, most tantalizing?”

World building pro tip: Throw in a few small details even you don’t quite understand. Maybe you’ll come back to it, maybe you won’t, but a few trivial unexplained bits will make your world feel bigger than the one little corner we’ll see in your story.

Does that sound pretentious? I always worry I sound pretentious when I’m giving genuine advice. Anyway, go easy on those lampreys, everybody!

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

DING DING DING! COVID IS HERE! COVID IS HERE!

After four solid years of successful COVID avoidance, my wife Ami was finally clobbered by it about a week ago. As of this moment I still don’t have it, though. The moment she started coughing we encased her in a sarcophagus of fresh cement, as per CDC guidelines.

Haven’t heard anything through her feeding tube in a couple days, though. Starting to get worried here!

NEXT WEEK: THE OGRE PILE.