SR 1 PAGE SEVENTY-NINE

And so we enter the edgiest issue of Serenity Rose.

“Edgy” is a relative thing, obviously (This won’t suddenly become a Mike Diana comic or anything). Issue four is just angrier and swear-ier than any of the others. I remember when my mom was reading this one I heard “BAD WORDS!” from the other room, and twenty minutes later she came out, placed it on my desk, and said “I’ll just leave this here then.” That was the full review!

*I* still like issue four, though. In fact, it’s my second-favorite of the original five floppies. Probably the strongest artwork of them all? You decide, I guess!

Sera’s “witch rankings” on this page are kind of interesting… How do you think “gothiness” is judged, exactly? Hours per year spent wearing exclusively black clothing (metal shirts excluded)? Total time in cemeteries for non-professional reasons? Lifetime expenditures at Hot Topic, Lip Service, and/or VampireFreaks dot com? Number of goth-classified songs in your playlist, with each song weighted by tragicness? (“Sure, it’s a Cure song, but it’s ‘Friday I’m In Love.’ 1/1000 tears.”)

No idea how “gothiness” is ranked, but I do know one thing for sure: Whoever’s sitting at #1 on the chart hates the word “goth” with a burning passion. Don’t even try giving them a trophy. (Unless it’s made from a real human skull. Or, like, fun candy.)

REF ROUNDUP: “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” is one of my favorite David Bowie songs. Some weird twitch of the brain made me cross-thread it with Rick James’ “Super Freak” here, and I didn’t notice the error until it went to print. This must never be corrected.

SR 1 PAGE EIGHTY

I owned a VW Beetle! 

LOVED that car. Bought it brand new in 2000, not long after I started on Invader ZIM, a cartoon series that was sure to last forever and fund car after car for fifty years or more. My bug was black, of course, and had a sweet FIVE-DISC CD changer in the trunk (MDFMK and Meg Lee Chin were permanent residents). I immediately christened my new chariot “The Doom Buggy” after the iconic conveyors from the Haunted Mansion, and dangled a small bit of chain from the rearview mirror for reasons that remain mysterious to this day. Sort of spooky, I guess? Maybe I just wanted to let any Cenobites in the neighborhood know I was down to clown?

Anyway, I was very excited to show off my Doom Buggy to the gang at work, so I offered to drive some folks to lunch. This was very unusual because I hate driving almost as much as I hate being useful to others, but when you’ve got a badass chain on your rearview and a FIVE-DISC changer full of backwards KMFDM in the trunk, you just gotta show off. Everyone was insanely impressed and said so.

“DAMN,” Jhonen yelled, eyes bulging out of his sockets. “I wish I had a small length of chain to put on stuff. Does that come with the car?” I just smiled and put on my tiny little sunglasses. Time to roll.

An hour later I backed my brand new Doom Buggy directly into a stucco wall behind a Chinese restaurant in Burbank. Everyone piled out to examine the damage.

“Oh wow,” Roman Dirge said, staring at all the fresh white pockmarks scouring the back right bumper of the car. “Maybe you can buff that out or something?” Somebody else asked about insurance.

I just smiled and put on my tiny little sunglasses. I had no knowledge about “buffing” or “insurance.” But what I did know was that Walgreens had extra-large band-aids in stock. I stuck one of those on the back of the Buggy and it stayed there for 17 years.

REF ROUNDUP: Tess’ license plate is a reference to legendary makeup effect artist Tom Savini, the scariest person in the world to me when I was about ten years old. Tom Savini’s name is synonymous with the kind of intense, splattery gore FX that bewitched/repulsed so many developing young brains like mine in the 80’s. Friday the 13th, The Prowler, Creepshow, Day of the Dead, nobody was better at artfully disassembling human bodies than Tom Savini. I didn’t see many of his movies as a kid, but I spent a lot of time staring at stills from them on the cover of Fangoria magazine at Waldenbooks. Wide eyed with HORROR, too scared to even touch the issue. What kind of person would make stuff like that??

My kind of people, it turned out!

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

HAY. A lot of you probably already know we self-published a little kids’ book starring Sunny and Milo back in 2019. It’s called IT’S NOT SCARY! and was released in both print and interactive app versions.

DANG the app was cool. We gathered together a bunch of talented voice actor pals, commissioned a killer score by Rani Sharone, and my brilliant wife Ami spiced the whole thing up with incredible animation, FX, and interactive bits. All in THREE-DEE (you would basically tilt your iPad like a shadowbox.)

Tragically, that version isn’t available to buy anymore (keeping apps updated as tech marches on is grotesquely expensive), but DO NOT DESPAIR. We just put a full play-through on YouTube:

So yeah, check it out! Everybody worked crazy hard on it, so it’s nice that it gets to keep on living somewhere. Makes for a nice kids’ book-sized appetizer for the big SHOCK CITY feast this fall.

NEXT WEEK: SUPERSTARS.