You'll notice that on the top page I practically shout at you to read this section. This is because I wince at the thought of someone opening one of the many PDFs linked there, squinting at it, thinking "This is crap, this woman doesn't know how to make a PDF properly," and leaving. The problem, I assure you, is not me.

I assume you are using Firefox because Firefox is the only web browser I use and, as far as I am concerned, the only one worth using. (I will not be taking questions at this time.) This means that when you open one of these PDFs, you are doing so in Firefox's inline PDF viewer. Which is broken. And has been broken for years.

You have probably opened the PDF in the setting marked "Automatic Zoom" (AKA size to screen width). If your browser window is the minimum width I suggest (just wide enough that you can see the image on the top of the main page without needing a horizontal scrollbar), the PDFs will be blurry because the viewer is scaling them DOWN badly; if your browser window takes up your whole screen and you have big monitors like I do, they'll be blurry because the viewer is scaling them UP badly.

But that's not the broken part. The broken part is when you set the zoom control to "100%" ... which a reasonable person would assume is actual size, right? Well, it isn't. And "Actual Size" isn't actual size either. It is lying.

To get the PDFs as close as possible to actual size, with nice sharp text and lines and not looking like crap, what you want is "75%." AGAIN: The Firefox PDF viewer's "100%" is more like 125%; its "75%" is 100%, or close enough. As a bonus, when you set it to 75%, you lock the size (it won't try to dynamically scale), and now you can use the presence or absence of a horizontal scrollbar to determine whether your browser window is wide enough.

Glad we could get that cleared up.

You'll notice that this will still require a fairly large browser window (assuming you don't want to have to scroll both horizontally and vertically to read the things, and what kind of masochist wants that?) My standard page image for these stories is 1440 pixels wide by 2880 pixels high. This should not be a problem if you are on a real computer with a decent-sized monitor. If you're on a tablet or a phone, as I warn you on the main page, I think you're going to find it just isn't going to work. I'm sorry about that, but I think the pages are too small as it is; I often have to size the source images down smaller than I'd like in the layout I'm using. I want big pictures! I'd love to be able to make stories that fill up my 1920x1080 monitor screens, but I recognize this would seriously put people off.

The individual page images are the same images that are bundled together in the PDF. Some people have claimed the individual images look sharper than the PDF does, which probably means the PDF viewer is trying to scale the pages and doing a bad job. Some people prefer the page-by-page image approach, which is why I provide them. Here the issue is that Firefox (again, I don't know about other browsers) stupidly tries to size the image so it fits in your window vertically. You will need to click on the image to expand it to full size in order to read it, and you'll have to do this for each and every image.

Also, I didn't put target=_blank on any of these links, so they don't open in a new tab by default. You will probably want to right-click the various links and open them in new tabs yourself.

Some of the shorter stories -- the threshold is usually if they're fewer than four images -- don't have PDF versions. Also, a few of the images are longer than my standard page, e.g. "Altered Status," a bonus story I did in Hallowe'en 2022, is a single image which is three of my standard pages long.

Thank you for your patience. The rest of this page is entirely optional.

You'll notice that out on the main page the word "comics" is sometimes in quotes, sometimes not. I haven't bothered to make it more consistent, because I like that this reflects my own ambivalence.

Not that I have any contempt for comics -- I grew up reading them, and I love them (though I do get tired of certain bits of Marvel/DC Same Old Shit). My ambivalence is that I'm not sure the peculiar things I make count as comics, both for better and for worse.

Certainly there are people who would be led by that word to expect something I can't and won't give them ... and, conversely, there are people who'd see that word and walk away without bothering to try them, because of their expectations of what that word means. You can't win.

These are stories which just happen to tell a certain amount of what they have to say via pictures. They can't be real comics because they're far too talky -- I don't just mean panels crammed with dialogue bubbles, I mean that often the stories don't have a lot of action. These are not wham-bam-boom stories. I don't write that kind of story.

So ... fans of actual comic books will be put off by the talkiness, the lack of action, and the fact that I use a rendering engine to make the pictures.

(More on that in another essay some day, but the short answer is I can't draw, and I can neither spare the money nor the time for an artist -- as it is, the renderer takes too long. Once the story is plotted, the creative process is finished, for me; the rest is two weeks of waiting on renders. If I had someone actually draw the pages, it wouldn't be two to three weeks per story, it'd be two to three months. I have too many stories to tell and not enough time.)

And fans of text stories ... will be put off by the fact that there are pictures at all ... and that I use a rendering engine to make the pictures.

Also, in addition to the renders being a time and money sink (I am not going to tell you how much I've spent building up a decent library of props and sets and figures and other such resources), the format causes technical difficulties. You can't read these stories on a mobile device without severe pain; you need a decent amount of screen real estate for the images, and the PDF versions usually don't work on mobile at all. I'm hostile to this tendency to want to do everything on a little bitty device that is unsuited for almost all of it, but I do also like stories to be available to as many readers as possible, and I agree that cutting off the mobile audience is not something done lightly.

So you may well be wondering: I said above that the actual creative process is the plotting and writing. I could write one of these stories, text-only, in an afternoon. And I've also said I know that the pictures are a big liability for a number of reasons. Why bother doing it this way, then? Why not just write them and post text stories? Why go from a couple of hours per story to a couple of weeks per story for a format that half your potential readers will find off-putting, and the other half will think ends up producing something that isn't really a comic book?

I have a good answer, but you might not like it:

If I did them as straight text stories, not enough people would read them.

My friends who read -- and because I am getting old and that means my friends are too, I do still have a lot of friends who read -- don't like to hear this. They don't like to hear me say "reading is dead," and when I say it, they go to some trouble to line up all kinds of reasons why I'm wrong.

Meanwhile, four out of five people who opened this web page saw the vast landscape of words awaiting them therein and fled in horror.

I link it to age on purpose. I think I was in one of the last generations who was taught to really read -- to be able to digest long chunks of words, to read for information, to read for pleasure, to actually read the instructions, to absorb context ... what I'm seeing is that the younger people are not getting any of these skills, and worse, they don't seem to understand why those skills may be desirable. Meanwhile, the information landscape and all those teeny little screens are fragmenting our entire world into thirty-second snippets, and we have an entire group of people in this country dedicated to destroying truth and knowledge and making it impossible to fact-check anyone so that they can lie and propagandize with impunity, and one of them just improbably got reelected president as I write this. I do not have the slightest confidence that we are going to reverse this trend. I do not see a promising future for prose fiction.

Hell, I rarely ever read for pleasure myself anymore. When I was a kid, I read constantly. I'd take home a stack of library books almost too tall for me to carry. We went to the library once a week. I usually ran out of books well before I ran out of week. These days, it's not just that I'd often rather be telling my own stories than reading someone else's; it's that there are simply too many things, too many little voices everywhere, chiming and scrolling and demanding my attention. I tend to read novels today only if I think I can devour them in one sitting (not as unlikely as all that -- I'm a very fast reader). If I step away from a book unfinished, I may never get back to it.

"But I'm raising a kid who reads!" I hear you cry. Good for you. I mean that sincerely. You're doing it right. Most other people are not.

I could be being overly pessimistic. I hear early rumblings, as of late 2024, that a backlash may have begun, and that the kids are all beginning to realize that they may be missing out on things by not putting down their phones and actually having experiences. Maybe we'll recover. (We'll need to destroy the damned generative text tools, though. That's an essay for another day.)

Anyway, the point is that I can post a four-to-six-thousand word story on AO3 and have it be lucky to get double-digit views over the course of the next several months ... or I can post a sixteen-to-twenty-page comic-format story and usually have it achieve at least a thousand views on DeviantArt within two days. That's with an equal amount of promotion for either, which is to say, zero.

Now, mind you, the audience has never been my primary reason for writing (I write stories because otherwise I would explode due to built-up brain pressure), and the DA vs AO3 audiences have some special issues and quirks built in which I'll discuss further down. So it's complicated, and it's ultimately not all that important. Nonetheless, if a story falls in the forest, I want someone to read it, and it strikes me that -- at least at this time -- putting it in a comic-style format offers best odds that someone will. All of the limitations and problems of the comic format are more than offset by the increased number of eyeballs I manage to reach.

Actually, the PDFs have a couple of hidden advantages in their disadvantages. They can't (yet) be scraped by generative tools and it's harder for people to steal art from them. And the people who think it is their job to remove all traces of sex from the world generally look for easier targets for their spittle and bile, and won't bother to actually page through a PDF to look for something to use their filthy scissors on.

Let's talk about that for a bit.

Actually, on the whole, the visual format works against me in the battle against the bluenoses. They mostly don't bother to read. A fairly explicit text description of two people having sex often sails right past them. If it's a picture -- if they can see it -- their tiny, saturated-with-self-righteousness brains have a special mode which immediately signals them that they have a chance to do the one thing they truly enjoy: making someone else miserable for no good reason. It's a good thing the PDFs are impenetrable to them, because otherwise certain panels in those PDFs would present a larger target than I care to give them. (As it is, I rarely ever put sex in the first four panels of a PDF, because those are the four panels you can see on the DeviantArt page for the post without scrolling.)

The topic of exactly how smutty my stories are or aren't, and why I do write smut, really calls for an essay of its own, and I'll try to keep it brief here.

I don't actually think I write pornography, but I have reasons to claim to out of solidarity. Porn is ridiculously oppressed in America, and what's worse is that "porn bad" is an extremely omnipartisan viewpoint, held even by some people who should know better. It's like being "tough on crime." Politicians are always tough on crime, because they know it's an easy sell and anybody who dares to say "hey, the picture here isn't what you're being told it is" will just get tarred with the "so you're the enemy too" brush immediately. It is very difficult to have a discussion on the class and economic issues of criminal prosecution and policing in this country, and the considerable flaws of both; it is similarly difficult to have a discussion on why pornography must be protected and is, for the most part (I concede there is some real sleaze and nastiness lurking in the porn anthill), a good thing.

But leaving the politics out of it, I think it is safe to say that anyone who reads my stuff hoping for wank material is going to be gravely disappointed. That, there, is the main reason I don't actually think I write porn. I don't even really write smut. I write stories which happen to have sex and kink in them. The sex and the kink are usually not gratuitous; they are usually plot points. For me, sex and kink are an important part of a person's character. You can't really get to know who Ruby Martinez is until you know who she goes to bed with, and what she likes in bed ... and you can't get to know any of that unless I show you.

Honestly, a lot of the time I find myself feeling that I need to warn much more for non-sexual weirdness than I do about the sex. My sex scenes tend to be single panels of two naked people on a bed (often on top of the blankets -- a running joke about these renders, due to technical limitations). I mean, you're going to look at them and wonder what the big deal is. All of my more eyebrow-raising scenes are things like people being changed into ice-cream cones or ducks or clowns or other bizarreness. If I worry about people having an allergic reaction to anything, it's my frequent mind-control themes, especially if someone has sex while mind-controlled, which by my rules automatically makes the scene dubious consent. Ya been warned.

There's a part of me that resents having to warn at all, apart from a blanket "Mature audiences only" at the top. I feel that everyone's also getting more prudish, in the sense that we're no longer teaching people to go "not my kink" and walk away harmlessly when they see something they don't like ... instead, they're doing things like trying to ban it. We're raising an awful lot of people who think it's OK to piss in someone else's soup.

I remember when DeviantArt was actually reasonably deviant. These days ... well, it depends on who you ask. DA's stated policies and their actual enforcement have never matched, and this situation has only gotten more acute as their policies have tightened. DeviantArt is a) extremely short-staffed and b) desperate for a revenue stream. These facts lead directly to the following two situations: a) A story will only get scrutinized for the banhammer if some bluenose finds it by chance and tattles. They no longer seem to maintain any in-house Bluenose Patrol of their own (they did, for a while). b) Your chances of a story escaping scrutiny are improved greatly if you give DA money. I pay for Core membership on DA, and I am convinced that this in itself has provided me with at least double the Bluenose Protection afforded to the unpaid posters (whom, it becomes clearer every day, they see as freeloaders).

And even so, even with that increased level of protection, two of the stories on this site had to be put into a special pay-to-access gallery among my DA galleries. The pay-to-access galleries have more lenient content rules, you see. I can't tell whether this is "We're making some money from it, so we're more forgiving" (DA gets a cut of what people pay to get in) or "That's got a sufficiently high bar to access that we're less worried about getting complaints from the bluenoses." Could be both. Anyway, if you like, you can go read "System 52U7" or "The Overthrow" and try to guess why they had to be put in a locked gallery on DA. (They are not locked anywhere else but DA, obviously.)

I don't go out of my way to put kink and sex content into stories; I'm telling the story I want to tell, and the story itself will inform me if it needs to have sex. Sometimes it doesn't. Sex is not a priority of the Quitclaim stories, though Randa does have sex and we're not ashamed to show it onscreen. Sex isn't even a priority in Sleeper Squad; I feel a need to always throw something in for the kink-seekers, but it's not necessarily sex; more often than not, it is some form of physical transformation.

But sometimes I do use sex as a loss leader ... or, if you prefer, a gateway drug. In particular, in the Tales From The Reality Next Door stories (except "Utilidolls," which is almost-plotless fetish fuel), I use sex to draw in eyeballs. Come for the smut and the kink; stay for the semi-serious treatment of malleability of flesh and identity and gender that I'm trying to sneak in on you when you're not paying attention. I'm not ashamed of this practice; I am sometimes ashamed of feeling like I have to sneak the ideas in, amid the fun and games, because no one wants them. I've been scarred by many years of people telling me that plot is a detriment to smut, I think.

That brings us to the matter of ...

I consider DeviantArt to be the "primary" post location of the comic-format stories, and I'll continue to do so until the rug is pulled out from under me. I cross-post them to AO3 (even though they're really not a good fit there) as insurance. This site, the one you're looking at right now, which I control and pay for myself, is strictly for additional insurance -- I have very little faith in DA's long-term future for a number of reasons, and AO3 seems rock-solid until you learn anything about the bone-headed decisions the Organization for Transformative Works makes on a regular basis, or the number of Corporate Forces that hate their guts and would like to see them driven from the earth. I don't really expect anyone to make my site their primary stop to see my new stuff. That's good, because it means I don't have to speculate on who my readership here is.

The DeviantArt readership wants kink, and moreover my audience there has self-selected to want specific kinds of kink. I can guess fairly precisely how well a story will do in advance just based on which kink content it does or doesn't contain. The thing to remember about the DeviantArt view count is that most of those views are from people who don't actually read the story or care about it. They are looking for the kink panels; they want those, and they want them free of context. Well, that's their prerogative.

The PDFs make it harder to do that, of course, which is why the views for even the most popular PDFs there don't come anywhere close to some of the most popular single-image posts. I've got enough of a steady base now that even Quitclaim stories, which have no kink and usually only very discreet sex scenes, will clear a thousand views without much trouble ... but many of the PDFs won't do much more than those thousand views. Contrast that with, say, "Don't Bother the Bunnies" (13,000+ views as of late 2024) or "Overdraft" (26,000+ views) which are both also in the comic format, but are long single images. (You'll find them both out on the main page.) None of the PDFs have come close to "Overdraft"; the most popular ones have generally topped out at nine to ten thousand. One, Sleeper Squad 43 ("The Program") has done especially well, but it's almost entirely because I posted a separate single panel from it later which has done fifty thousand views, and people were going back to the PDF to find the rest of that scene in case it was hot.

In other words, the DeviantArt audience divides into the kink-seekers and the True Readers, and the True Readers are a hard core of about fifty people at most. I'll settle for that; my novels sold to about fifty people each, and if it turns out I just have a hard core of fifty people my entire life, it's still fifty people better than zero.

I'm interested in pleasing the True Readers. I am not especially interested in pleasing the kink-seekers; if I were, I'd just do single-panel TGTF or mind-control or robotization images over and over, with very little variation and no story whatsoever, and they'd love it. (There are plenty of posters on DA who do exactly that, and the generative-art situation has made it even worse.)

Over on AO3 the situation is very different. In a way, they're all True Readers there; I think I can safely say that the AO3 readers are more interested in story than the DA folk are. I think the view count on an item I post at AO3 comes much closer to being a view count of people who actually read the story. This is why the counts are often only in double digits, and why they have extremely long tails; often I won't have an item pass one hundred views until years after it's posted.

There are a couple of things peculiar to AO3 which hurt me. First, the idea of something being posted in comic format at all is kind of alien to AO3, and I'm sure there are people who come in, see a set of image pages, and run away. Second, original work doesn't really belong on AO3 and I always feel a little guilty using it for that. Most people who go to AO3 go for fanfic, and smutty fanfic at that. I write very little of either kind.

Understand, I have no complaints, especially given that I am shoving a square peg firmly into a round hole there, and that I do no self-promotion other than a new-item announcement on various social media. As of late 2024, I have thirteen items at AO3 which have passed the one-thousand-views mark, and a few more that probably will within a few months. Only one of those items is a prose piece; the rest are all comic-format. So someone there is reading them.

It's interesting to note, though, that there is only one Sleeper Squad issue in the hot list, and it's issue 1; my theory is that people go have a look at that issue, are daunted by the Mountain of Backstory they see looming ahead, and don't read any more of them. (Also, issue 1 is kind of weak, even in revised form.) The three comic-format stories that have done the best there are "System 52U7", "Wash and Wear," and "Bioproxy." The former is an aberration -- I directed people there, the only time I've ever done so, so they could avoid having to pay the dollar for the pay gallery on DA, and I believe that accounts for the traffic. The latter two are both, and I feel this is not coincidence, concerned with changes into a voluptuous woman. ("Bioproxy," possibly my favorite comic-format story to date, deserves the traffic; "Wash and Wear" probably doesn't.) Actually, come to think of it, "System 52U7" is concerned with that too, albeit in a very different way.

Incidentally, I don't link my DA and AO3 sites anywhere else on these pages, so if you wandered in here by chance and for some reason you'd like to see what those look like:
DeepestTrilby on DeviantArt
EccentricFlower at AO3
You won't find anything on AO3 you can't find here, but my DA site has all kinds of other stuff -- single-image posts, other projects, a few odds and ends I didn't bother to repost here. Get it while it still exists; but bear in mind that nine-tenths or more of my DA content is marked "Mature" and you may need to be a logged-in DA user to see it.

I started working in Daz Studio because I was making a game called Hotel Eleusis, and the game needed to have pictures, and I can't draw. I couldn't afford to commission art, and Studio was free and seemed able to do what I wanted. (Little did I know at the time that Studio may be free, but to use it effectively you need an enormous library of expensive resources.)

The game sank like a stone, due partly to circumstances entirely beyond my control, some of which I will eventually discuss in an essay elsewhere. But by that time I had grown fascinated with using Studio as a tool. I've always felt hampered by my lack of ability to draw, especially in a world where it was becoming clear that long-form reading was dying. (And if you are planning on saying, or even thinking, some equivalent of "git gud" such as "just learn to draw," be warned that this is one of the few things that you can say to me which will get me to tirade angrily into your face, flecks of spittle and all, and possibly stop speaking to you. My heart rate goes up even typing this paragraph.) Anyway, I decided to try using Studio to make illustrated stories.

My first go at it was definitely much more of an illustrated story than anything resembling a comic book. It was one of two Christmas stories I did in 2020, called "Guidance." The other was a story told in two parts in text below two single-image posts, called "Regifting." Neither is here -- "Guidance" embarrasses me now, for reasons which will become clear in a moment, and "Regifting" is the kind of thing I could just write again in my sleep if I needed to -- but if you're determined, I have not removed them from the TTTT subgallery of my DA account.

"Guidance" was done before I owned Comic Life 3, so all the dialogue bubbles are just ovals in my paint program, and thought bubbles are horrible, and the typography is not good and the flow is not good and in general it is just a mess. But it still amuses me -- the basic idea is sound, even if the execution sucked -- and the main character is a woman named Ruby Martinez. That same December, at the very end of the year, I posted a fake film poster for "Sleeper Squad," a movie about "a pair of operatives who attempt to change the world in positive ways by entering various people's dreams and manipulating the dream scenarios. A little like Inception, but simultaneously kinkier and more light-hearted, and with a plot that actually bears scrutiny." Two months later, that concept and Ruby -- both somewhat altered in the process -- combined to make the first issue of Sleeper Squad.

Since then, I have, in a modest way, steadily improved. Not just proficiency with Studio, but getting better at knowing what to do and not do in page layout, getting better at timing and flow (on a comic-book page, space is time and time is space), not overwriting quite so horribly, etc. This has led me to the situation where I am sometimes hesitant to send people to earlier work because it kind of embarrasses me now. (And this is not over a long period of time! Hotel Eleusis and "Guidance" were both completed at the end of 2020. It's the end of 2024 as I type this.) A lot of old material is still up on DA, and I wince a little when one of the Hotel Eleusis work images gets favorited, or when certain of the page-by-page images of Sleeper Squad 3 get more traffic ... though I know the reason for that (see below).

As I note on the main page, I think Sleeper Squad 12, "Bliss," was the first issue where I was really "this looks more or less the way I wanted it to look, no notes." 12 is still pretty amateurish by comparison to my later work, but all the bones were in position; I'd settled on the structure and I'd figured out what everything was supposed to be doing. This isn't to say the issues before that were complete garbage (and several of them contain plot points that would become extremely important later!), but some of them are painful for me to look at.

SS 6, "Gaze of the Cat," for example, is an experiment that failed. (By contrast, SS 13, "The Fisher Case," is an experiment that worked, and I wish it appealed to more people.) "Gaze of the Cat" is my weird tribute to Will Eisner, one of the comic-book artists most formative to me. It's supposed to be a Spirit story; one of his "caught up in weird events in some strange place" kind of stories, that he did so well. It really should look like a Spirit story, and it does not, and my attempt at it just makes a lot of the panels badly lit and difficult to make out. (On the other hand, there's one panel in the story which I think is one of the most beautiful single panels I've ever done.)

I am sometimes tempted to remake these earlier issues (especially "Gaze"), since my grasp of what I'm doing has gotten so much better. But the only one I've actually remade, and the only one I'm likely to remake, is issue 1. This is because issue 1 was not just very, very clumsy, but because it was in a different page size and layout from all the others, and that annoyed me. If it had only been clumsy, I might have left it.

When I redid SS 1, I kept it to the same eight pages as the original (though they are bigger pages, because they changed to my basic eight-panel layout). That was the length I originally thought these stories were going to be. But eight pages isn't enough, and that's one reason the story in SS 1 is skimpy. It would not suffice today.

SS 12 is significant for another reason; that's the first issue where I posted only a PDF on DA. Before that, I had been posting the stories as individual image pages with navigation links underneath. (I was thrilled to be able to stop doing the nav links, which took ages.) I backposted PDF versions of 1-11 there, but I did not take down the original page-by-page posts of 1-11. This is significant if you are deeply curious or deeply masochistic, because that means DA is the only place you can see the original version of SS 1, in page-by-page form.

(The elimination of the page-by-page posts was a big blow to the kink-seeking audience. You can go through the page-by-page story posts and tell, from the view count, which are the pages with Easily Spotted Kink Content. SS 3/4 are particularly notorious for this; any pages which have people in the full-body black Euphoric suits will have about a thousand more views than the pages which do not. The page-by-page versions of 3/4 and 11, in particular, are still getting views and favorites to this day, which is one reason I don't take them down.)

Anyway, this is one of several reasons why I don't tell people to start with SS 1 if they are getting ready to dive in; the other, of course, being the Mountain of Backstory. I also don't tell people to start with the first Quitclaim, "The Void Eaters," though there it makes less difference because I try to keep each Quitclaim story as standalone as possible.

When I did "The Void Eaters" I didn't have a clear idea of what these stories were going to be, and the first one is very much an aberration in a lot of ways. It's a good story, and the story comes through despite some difficulties in formatting and lighting (lighting is a continual bear in Quitclaim because Space is Dark, which means Space Is Hard To Light) ... but it's not like any other Quitclaim story, and likely never will be.

In short (too late), the older the date of a comic-format story on these pages, the more it comes with an implied disclaimer of "please don't judge my later work by the quality of this one." I keep them around because good story covers a multitude of sins, and they do have good stories. They just need to be taken with a grain of salt.

One reason this essay is long is because the format I'm using on the main page doesn't allow me to put long notes on the comic-style stories -- it'd be unpleasant to read. (If your reaction is "good, shut up," I point out that almost all of the PDF posts on DA have, either directly under them or in an adjacent post, a set of "work notes" discussing some of the Studio processes and pitfalls that went into that particular story, and I have not reproduced those work notes on this site. So it could have been much, much worse.)

Anyway, the point is, anything random I need to say about a particular story has to go here; I have no other place to put it. This section is for that.

Early Sleeper Squads. The peculiarities of Sleeper Squad 1, 3/4, and 6 are discussed in the section above.

The Void Eaters. The first Quitclaim story is different from all the successive ones. This is discussed in the section above.

Coldpoint. The Coldpoint stories are actually a universe-within-a-universe, but you don't need to be aware of that to appreciate them. The idea is that "Coldpoint" is actually a passive (television series, more or less) made by Ruby Martinez and Trish Carter in the Sleeper Squad universe. You can see the "behind the scenes" process of them making the first Coldpoint episode "Death and Denial" in SS 27, "Complexity." The passive was apparently a hit, but we never see them making any other episodes (they finish making them during the three-year gap that follows issue 29). Again, none of this affects your appreciation of Coldpoint in the slightest, though it does explain why the Coldpoint stories are filed in the Sleeper Squad subgallery over on DA.

Invasion of the G Girls. This is the third thing we've seen (so far!) that's the output of third-rate film studio Trilby International Pictures. All three, again so far, have had Melody Harper and Dee Dallas in them (though here they are not main characters). The other two are the wordless "Mars Needs Bimbos" and the too-hot-for-DA "System 52U7."

In the 1970s there appeared briefly a small subset of SF and/or horror films which were in some ways a direct negative reaction to women's liberation. Some of them were genuine backlash from disgruntled men, but most of them were pretty tongue-in-cheek (The Stepford Wives, a perpetual kink favorite in some of the circles I run in, was not meant to be taken seriously, no matter that some (horrible) people seem to think it's a utopian fantasy -- Ira Levin had the most deadpan dark humor in the business, see also Rosemary's Baby).

It's hard to say whether the people who thought up Invasion of the Bee Girls meant it as satire or humor or actual horror or what. The script is so bad that it's impossible to tell. But I do note that if you think my story has too much hostility toward men, you probably don't want to watch Bee Girls -- I'm actually much gentler; in the movie, when the altered women have great sex with the men, the men die afterward.

This story was originally planned to be the fourth segment in "Fright Gallery." It was cut for time reasons and because I thought (correctly) I would need more pages to do it justice.

The Overthrow and System 52U7. These two stories had to be placed into a paylocked gallery on DeviantArt. See the "smut" section above.

Overdraft. See remarks above on the popularity of this one-page item, which was done start to finish in about three hours.

The Womanizer. This could be filed, with equal justification, in the Tales From The Reality Next Door category. Though it's a comic book (and no, I never did any other issues of it, though I have been tempted to actually do the next one that's teased at the end), it is apparently a comic book that exists in the TFRND universe -- which is an important plot point in "ReVamp"! In general, the TFRND stories insist on crossing and overlapping a lot more than I had planned, but I think this is the only time they have reached out and grabbed some other unrelated continuity.