After the party
The Amazon.ca thing came about because every time I ordered something from them, it would arrive the next morning! It was kind of creepy, yet wonderfully futuristic.

NOW Magazine has been used as a plot device a few times. It’s a real thing, one of those ubiquitous urban free weekly arts papers. We literally always would be checking NOW for listings and stuff, so I couldn't help putting it in the book (again and again and again).

Scott zooms away after Knives kisses him, and if you look at him closely, he’s just this poorly-drawn, twitchy thing. That’s a device I picked up from a ridiculously funny manga and anime called “Sexy Commando Gaiden: Sugoi-yo Masaru-san!”, introduced to me by an old friend many years ago.

Sunday evening
Knives is wearing the jacket she didn’t buy at Goodwill. I guess she went back and got it. Scott is wearing a “Canadian Girls Kick Ass!” shirt, which is one of those crappy touristy things (and generally only worn by girls). Neil’s shirt has an approximation of the Napster logo, which I always thought was cute.

I like the way Scott and Kim are completely uninterested in Stills’ story about the show. I had originally wanted to make the whole process of playing shows a lot less glamorous, but that kind of got left by the wayside a bit. Anyway: playing shows is pretty unglamorous in real life.

Crash and the Boys are named after a NES game, Crash N’ the Boys Street Challenge (localized from one of those Technos Japan “Riki & Kunio” games, as was River City Ransom). The little girl, Trasha, is totally made up (I hope you knew that)!

Ramona, come closer
The line is from a Bob Dylan song covered by the Flying Burrito Brothers. The scene when she comes to the door was kind of tricky to write, I recall, because Scott says a lot of things that I would never say (or at least be brainless enough to say out loud). I also had to establish our first impression of Ramona, and up to this point I knew very little about her. I like the way she chews her pencil and stuff, her body language.

I can elaborate a bit on the whole subspace highways thing – it comes out of the fact that Canada is a few years behind in a lot of consumer technology. The first example that comes to mind is point-of-purchase ATM card transactions. If you wanted to use your bank card in a grocery store five or six years ago, the USA had you covered but Canada was pretty spotty. The technology is still not as good here. Something as simple as cell phones is probably another good example. Yeah, Europe and Japan have them before the USA, but Canada is another two years behind. So the idea behind subspace highways (and some other Ramona-related stuff) is that maybe the Americans figured out the technology and it’s just taking a while to trickle down to us in Canada. Or maybe we’ll NEVER get it. Sometimes that’s how it goes.

Another little thing I like is how, at the end of this scene, Scott signs his name really gigantically and runs out of space on the form.



So Yeah
There was a huge April blizzard that year and I remember walking home from the Beguiling in hip-deep snow (or so I remember it; I’m probably exaggerating). I’m sure I came home and wrote “they meet during a crazy April blizzard,” and this scene came out of that. I like their ambiguous, runaround, getting to know you dialogue. (Also her line “I’m waitin’ on you!” is Starcraft dialogue that I struggled to insert seamlessly into the book.)

They walk through a park called Hillcrest Park, which I didn’t reference. There are stairs up one side and down the other side (coming out on Christie), so they’re heading generally east, and then they walk down Christie as the blizzard picks up, supposedly.

The “falling through subspace” page was going to be something completely different, but I like what I ended up with.

Ramona’s apartment
The exterior was from some random snapshot I took on some random side street near Dundas and Bathurst. The foyer is based on the house where Chris and I used to live, and her kitchen was vaguely inspired by another friend’s apartment. There’s a Johnny Cash photo on the wall, and another random photo of some people (possibly Ramona’s family). The 20 different kinds of tea is a joke on Hope, who had a whole lot of tea when I met her. (I like Scott’s line “there’s more than one kind of tea?”) The poster for Rear Window is also a slight nod to Hope, who likes Hitchcock just fine.

Sometimes I’m proud of the sexy scene and sometimes I’m not sure about it. The book gets read by younger kids than I’d expected, which makes me nervous, but at the same time it’s not at all explicit, and I’d like to think of it as positive. I kind of balked in Volume 2 and 3, not going into Scott and Ramona’s sex life at all. Obviously the books aren’t about sex, but I’d like to keep things well-rounded...

Eventually...
I don’t know why Matthew Patel’s challenges come in the form of junk mail (or at least are interpreted that way). I guess he’s just too meek and polite in writing to be seen as a threat. As the first boss, he obviously had to be kind of pathetic.

Knives’ haircut was supposed to be sort of the “Amelie,” which was insanely popular among hip girls for a while. Scott was originally supposed to successfully break up with her in this scene, and when it came time to write it, he just pussied out. That kind of thing is tough, and he’s a weakling.

24 hrs later
The Rockit was a real club, a total dive, but last time I went to Toronto I noticed it was gone. We once played in a battle of the bands there with a bunch of terrible teenaged punk bands. I really failed to capture how cramped, ugly and terrible the place was. I kind of made it huge. Sorry! The backstage area is also completely fictional, as in it most likely never existed at all. There wasn’t room.

I like how Wallace is the only one who dresses like an adult (I assume this is because he’s gay and therefore has fashion sense). The character of Jimmy is an amalgamation – someone kept having the hots for my sister’s dates, although he never went as far as Wallace gets (kissing!). He’s named Jimmy ONLY because I wanted her to say “This is Jimmy,” which is a Starcraft line (spoken by Jim Raynor when he answers the com sometimes).

A note: Knives grows up quickly, and becomes fashionable and aggressive, which mirrors Envy’s transformation (in Scott’s recent past) – which is why he’s already starting to be terrified of her before Ramona even becomes a possibility!

The whole Crash and the Boys sequence is just pure fun and nonsense. The only note I’ll make is that the “Baby I was born to destroy you!” spread was supposed to be this detailed, Akira-esque wave of destruction, but I chickened out on drawing it. Oh, and it says “The Archies” on the drums because I feel that all cartoon bands are somehow related to the Archies.

Matthew Patel
Some people hate this part. The fighting at the start is pure Capcom, with an Alpha Counter and then a sweep / air juggle. I drew this scene pretty early in the book because they wanted some fighting stuff to show off.

Scott’s shirt says “Mass Teen Fainting” and there’s fainted teens all around him, but it wasn’t even a conscious thing – it’s just the title of the first Plumtree album. Happy coincidence!

Matthew Patel is thus named because someone I know dated two Matthews, and I really liked this designer named Harsh Patel (he designed the font that I used for the large titles such as “So Yeah,” and gave it to me for free because, uh, we were both Sloan fans?). He’s visually based on a guy I saw on the train one time, and he’s Indian because... uh... because his name is Patel. And I was planning more of a Bollywood thing, which got toned down into the slightly-less-baroque scene we see shortly.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking with Ramona’s flashback. I was operating on pure instinct. When she says “for some reason they all wanted me” you’re supposed to look at her and realize they all wanted her because she had a fully-developed body in the seventh grade (ie boobies!). This is compounded by Matthew Patel being like 3 feet shorter than her. All I remember about middle school is that I was like five feet tall and all the girls were gigantic.

“Nothing but pre-adolescent capriciousness” is another one of my secret favourite lines. It’s deliciously overwrought.

“You won’t know what hit you in the slightest!”
Most likely my favourite drawing in the book. The scene is inspired on one level by Bollywood stuff, on another level by the video for Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much”, and on a third level by the Para Para comic by Andy Seto. The dance number was planned from the start, but I hadn’t thought about how to approach it until I realized: they should all be doing the pose from the cover! Yeahhh!

I like the large panels and the kinetic feeling. The truth is, I drew this entire scene in one night from about midnight to 6 AM. Actually, the truth is that I drew almost the entire book – at least a hundred pages – in the final month before it was due. I’m unable to work that way anymore. I don’t think this book suffers too much for it – it has a certain sense of demented urgency which works for the story. But, yeah, can’t do it anymore.