SR 1 PAGE FORTY-THREE

Ugh, there’s that slur again. Sorry, everybody. I believe this is the second and final time it appears in the Serenity Rose saga, and just like before, it’s coming from a character we’re supposed to find repulsive. Might change it for future printings of the book.

Lot of pop punk hate on this page. Not sure why… Sure, it’s not my thing, but why so much hostility? I’m certain there are pop punk bands I’d like if I just dug into it a little. I actually had a roommate for a while who was a in a pop punk band, and he was a perfectly nice man. (Clean Hurley shirts, sensibly-sized ball chain necklaces, etc.) I hear the Blink 182 guy found some aliens or whatever, so there’s a pop punker out there making a difference in our world. The genre’s not all bad!

Maybe the problem is that at the time I wrote this (2001) the pop punk genre was in its most aggressively “frat boy” stage. Music for dudes lighting farts, basically. 

Now, I’m definitely not above a lit fart, but a lit fart just isn’t funny enough all by itself. Like, what is the context of the fart? What are the consequences? Is anyone in agony? For me, a lit fart is only funny if it blows up a hospital.

We can, should, and must demand better fart jokes.

Which brings us, of course, to Augusto Pinochet. The human fart joke. 

Pinochet was the loathsome right-wing dictator of Chile in the 70’s and 80’s. Fun guy! Hired a cult of Nazi pedophiles to torture his political enemies. (Look up “Colonia Dignidad” if you never want to sleep again. Then look up “The Wolf House” for a related hallucinatory animated freakout.) Directly put in power by the CIA, Pinochet is one of the top counter-examples when your dad says the US always backs the good guys. I was reading a lot of left-leaning history books at the time, and Pinochet came up quite a bit. Definitely more of a Kelton subject than poo pirates.

So yeah, in this post I veered from pop punk toilet jokes to the grim legacy of Augusto Pinochet, just like I do on this page. This is the magic of Serenity Rose.

SR 1 PAGE FORTY-TWO

This is probably the sweetest, saddest page in the book. It’s the only moment in the entire series when we get even the slightest glimpse of Sera’s mom. In book two we hear she died of a “mysterious illness” when Sera was four, but other than that, no references. At one point I was toying with the idea that her mom’s illness was somehow the result of giving birth to a witch, but I never developed that very far. Which is just as well. Sera has enough to guilt to deal with. No need to dump “might have killed her own mom” on the pile.

The concept of “born witches” makes the Serenity Rose version of witchcraft a little different than the standard legends. Witches in this world are more like the X-Men. (LOVED the X-Men as a kid.) Saying witches are Born This Way was my way of giving people spooky supernatural powers without also having to say “The medieval witch-finders were right, everybody! Satanic pacts all around! Witch burning: JUSTIFIED. Let’s put a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum in every school!” 

Nope, the witchfinders are still wrong. In this world, witchcraft can’t be learned, magic spells don’t exist, and nobody’s ever made a deal with Beelzebub. Anyone ever murdered for being a witch is innocent. In fact, there are only ever 57 real witches alive at any one time, so there’s basically zero chance you’ll ever meet one. Sorry, bud, those are the breaks!

I do keep the world’s fraught history with the concept of “witchcraft” in place, though. All of the old legends are still there. I figure every time someone encountered one of Sera’s witchy forebears, a new legend would spring up, and over time the original story would get mangled, distorted, and ultimately used to justify all the ruling class’ most heinous actions. “I saw a little girl floating through the forest dancing with trees,” twists into “A harlot conspired with the Devil to raise a legion of murderous oaks, and only we men of God can stop her now.”

Witches aren’t real but jack-in-the-boxes, tragically, are. I had one of the classic clown ones as a kid. It scared me so much I always had to point it away from me while I turned the crank. Why did I turn the crank at all, then? Not sure, but there has to be a metaphor for being a horror artist in there somewhere…

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

A little over halfway through the thumbnail layouts for SHOCK CITY book two. You know, a 230-page comic book is kind of a lot of comic book, isn’t it? Why I did this?

NEXT WEEK: AND SHE’S SINGLE, TOO, BOYS!