SR 1 PAGE SIXTY-ONE

Hold on…Does Sera use medical bandages for binding? This is not the physician-approved way of doing it, Sera! Ace bandages can cause serious breathing problems and chest pain, even punctured lungs. Please invest in proper binding technology to explore your gender identity (seriously)!

Of course, as a shapeshifting witch, Sera doesn’t need any technological help for physical exploration. This bandage thing is just a puzzling fashion choice. At the time I thought wrapping bandages around various body parts looked super-cool. Not sure where that came from…Don’t recall “mummy chic” ever being much of a trend in goth/industrial culture. Pretty big in comic book ninja circles for a while, though, so maybe that’s it? Yeah, Elektra is the culprit here. Or the Turtles. Sera is basically Michelangelo.

But that brings up another point: Sera can look like pretty much anything, right? So why is she so tiny? And fragile-looking? There’s nothing wrong with being tiny and fragile-looking, and if that’s her choice, awesome, but I don’t think it is her choice, exactly. There might be something more supernatural going on. Sera sees herself as a small, frail creature, so maybe she’s subconsciously keeping herself in a small, frail form. It would be interesting to get a nice, clear picture of both her parents for comparison, but we never do. If they were both big, burly people that would raise some fun questions.

All mirrors should come with a special slot to encourage spiderwebs and I will not back down on this point.

SR 1 PAGE SIXTY-TWO

Big LORE page! And some big introductions.

ATLAN SAMUEL: Barely anything about Atlan here, but he gets a couple pages in book two. He’s modeled after those old-timey 30’s pulp heroes like “Doc Savage: Man of Bronze” (ask your great-great grandfather’s ghost). BONUS: This panel is also the first appearance of Sera’s dad. Or at least Sera’s dad’s fiercely protective arm.

EMILY ASH: The idea of Emily Ash is so spooky to me. That someone could have all this creative power and choose to never, ever use it is deeply disturbing. It’s like digging through a pile of your grandmother’s old papers after she dies and finding one exquisite self-portrait on a scrap of paper. “What could have been” would haunt you forever.

OGDEN MICHAEL FULMOUTH: These two are basically Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate. Starkweather is a real-life psychopath who went on a murder spree in the 50’s, with Fugate as his accomplice. I’m not really a true crime aficionado, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of movies inspired by the case: The Sadist, Kalifornia, Natural Born Killers, and, most importantly for my particular spookablast vibe, Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners. (Still maybe my favorite Peter Jackson movie?) Stray fact: The headline “Terror Couple Kills Colonel” comes from a Bauhaus song. Not Starkweather and Fugate, though. Whole different terror couple.

RIVET HED: We’ll go much deeper into Rivet Hed in issue four. Another character born at CalArts around 1999, his whole vibe is basically “What if a nu-metal witch ran Survival Research Laboratories.”

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

Went to the zoo for Ami’s birthday last week! A gorilla gazed upon me, and I have chosen to see this as a good omen. LET’S GOOOOOOOO.

NEXT WEEK: JUST SKARSDAYLE.