HEART-SHAPED SKULL

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE Well, here it is: The final page of Serenity Rose Vol. 1: Working Through the Negativity. After 60+ weeks of fairly long-winded page commentary we’ve finally come to the end of our glorious collective word-journey. (With pictures.) And what a nice page to end on (ignoring the bonus bit…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN A thesis statement emerges! Right here on the third-to-last page of the entire book! The climactic revelation of a point! That’s right: the entirety of Serenity Rose: Working Through the Negativity was about paralysis all along. Artistic paralysis. Creative paralysis. Life paralysis. That feeling of knowing you have some…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE So what happened on that bus, anyway? I never went into much detail about that. We know Sera pulls it into the sky and sends it whirling around doing barrel rolls and loop-de-loops and whatnot. One guy in issue two mentions she conjured “icey bitey things” to torment the…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE (NOTE: Something screwy is going on with WordPress. Or I just screwed something up. Apologies if this is a double-post today! Anyway…) I didn’t know Sera was gay when I started Serenity Rose. I didn’t think about her romantic inclinations at all, really.  I knew that Kelton had an…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE Another specific autobiographical detail that made its way into Serenity Rose unaltered: Despite the giant “WEIRDO” target painted on my head, nobody ever picked on me in school. I know! I can’t believe it either! For some reason, all the other kids pretty much left weirdo Aaron alone to…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND NINETEEN I got into a little trouble for this page. Can you guess why? Nope, it wasn’t the caricature of the rapper in the upper right corner. That is arguably racist, though, isn’t it? It’s meant to be your typical white suburban mom’s fevered mental image of a gangsta rapper,…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN Okay! So this is fun… See all those witches mentioned toward the bottom of the page there? Who are they? Totally random nobodies I dashed off without a thought, or a tiny glimpse of a deeper lore never explored in the rest of the series? Thankfully for this newsletter,…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN Ugh, if only we could all have a private little getaway in the clouds right now… I felt certain pangs of guilt about this issue back in 2004. Not over anything philosophical or political or whatever, but about the artwork. ART guilt. Two-thirds of the comic is two characters…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN You know what? Dialect is tricky. Why do I have Vicious talking like a chimney sweep here? A Dick Van Dyke chimney sweep? Trying to crawl back into 2004 Aaron’s brain here… I think I was just trying to reiterate that V is indeed English, and the reader should…

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND ELEVEN How great would it be to have a little floating cottage in the Cotswolds? If you’ve been paying extremely close attention, you might have noticed this is the same cottage we saw on Vicious’ little bio page back in the last issue. Apparently at some point she magically wrenched…