megan rosalarian gedris

Because Lesbian Pirates has always been parodying the absurdity of the skimpiness of female costumes in comic books. Wonder Woman herself is part of what they’re making fun OF.

Plus, saying “comics r comics” is silly. There’s a whole lot of different kinds of comics that hold lots of different roles.

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Great question!

There’s a difference between a graphic novel and a webcomic, even if the intent is to print the webcomic into a graphic novel format.

A graphic novel is first drawn all at once, then printed all at once, then read all at once. You can read a typical graphic novel in a day. If nothing much happens on page 37, that’s okay, because page 38 is right there. And so is page 39. If you want to show a day in which a character does nothing but lay on his couch, you can have a page that is the same shot of him on the couch 20 times.

But if you try to do that same page with a webcomic, your audience is going to be very unsatisfied. Because they can’t just immediately turn the page to where a truck comes crashing through our hero’s living room. They have to wait at least a day. And that’s as interesting as tuning in to the latest episode of your favorite show to have it be half an hour of the main character doing a crossword by herself. Doesn’t matter if Friday’s episode is the sex-on-top-of-a-burning-pile-of-bombs-and-cocaine-and-hookers-in-space episode if Monday-Thursday’s episodes were a four-part saga about doing the laundry.

Webcomic pages have to make sense by themselves, and within the context of a larger story. It’s not drawn all at once, and it’s not read all at once. So something needs to HAPPEN on every page. I tell people I try to make sure there’s either a laugh or a gasp with every update. If I know I need a full page of nothing happening for dramatic effect, I try to post 2 pages.

YU+ME is almost done, and can be read all at once now, either online or print. But MOST of my audience, my primary audience, has been reading it one page at a time for years, and that’s the audience I need to be writing for. That audience would never have stuck around if only 1 out of every 4 updates had something happen. In graphic novels that builds drama. In webcomics, that builds boredom.

I’m not saying that webcomics that pace themselves like graphic novels are bad COMICS, just bad WEBcomics. When read all at once, they might be fabulous, but that’s beside the point of webcomics. You have to be aware of your story’s vehicle. You can’t say a car is bad because you can’t drive it through Lake Michigan. You just gotta know when you need a boat.

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Jackie Monroe’s town is cursed. Anyone born there will die there, and all the time in between is riddled with nothing but calm mediocrity. Jackie is determined to beat the curse and make something of herself, or as she puts it, “Live a life someone would want to read a book about.”

But Jackie’s impatience and easily distracted nature make it hard for her to get anywhere. One week she’s going to be an astronaut, one week she’s going to be a rock star, one week she’s going to be a politician. She’s been in college for ten years now, still with no clue what she wants to do. The story mostly focuses on her attempts to accomplish her crazy goals.

Her friends humor her. Saffron, her roommate, studied fashion design, but at 22, she’s already resigned to being a waitress for the rest of her life. Jackie’s boyfriend Tom is a librarian who is waiting for the day Jackie settles down and starts a family with him. Jackie’s family consists entirely of office workers.

And then there’s Moira, Saffron’ girlfriend. Moira was born far away and at 26, she’s already lived ten times as much as Jackie, and doesn’t have the curse to contend with. She’s well on her way to becoming a rock legend, and Jackie is insanely jealous.

While Jackie spends her time trying to find some way to be awesome, she fails to notice all the interesting details around her, including some rather disturbing events that might actually make her special.


The tone of the story alternates between funny slice-of-life and dark psychology. Much like YU+ME, there is a twist that changes everything, and I’m hoping that, after so much time reading YU+ME, my readers will stick around after everything changes.

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Okay, I’m not actually scripting yet, but I’m doing more detailed outlines.

So, Meaty Yogurt, a.k.a. Mediocre (its old name; people still don’t know about the name change) was originally meant to be sort of lighthearted, slice-of-life fare.

But a couple weeks ago, I got this idea in my head for something that would fit in perfectly with the story, but it’s absolutely a 180 from the original tone of the story. I tried to forget about it, to go back to the outline I had written already, but this dark idea kept growing in a corner of my mind. It would not shut up.

I had quite a lot of plans for Meaty Yogurt, not just with the comic itself, but in how I was going to present it. But none of them make sense with the story anymore. And I’m a bit sad to see them go. I was looking forward to doing something like my original plans. And it certainly had more mainstream appeal.

It’s still about Jackie. It’s still about the cursed town, and her attempts to escape it. But it’s a lot… deeper now. A lot darker. And it’s better. That’s why I can’t leave it alone. Because I somewhat agree with the people who say selling out is when you trash a good idea for something that is not as good but more potentially lucrative.

I would have enjoyed doing the original story. If I’d never had the better idea, I could have done the original story without a care in the world, and had fun, and maybe gone places with it that lots of people would have liked. But now that I have had the idea, I can’t go back to the old story.

This is a story that will actually appeal to YU+ME fans, I think. At least the ones who really loved all the twists and revelations like “Oh yeah, Lia was a serial murderer.” And it has multiple art styles, too. So I suppose I’ll be able to retain some of my current readership with this one, and that makes sense, too.

But who knows, I might have an even better idea next week, negating all of this. Really, the story will turn out to be whatever idea is in my head when I start it next year. There’s a lot of time to change it.

I might try writing it as a novel first, and adapt it to a webcomic after that. I’ve been wanting to write some prose for forever.

Stories end when a writer decides to end them. There’s ALWAYS more story after any end. Yes, you could argue that the end of the epilogue is really more of a proper ending, and I would say that’s a valid point. So you don’t have to call this the end if you don’t want to.

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For all the romantic stuff I write, I don’t believe in soulmates. There is no one person that fits us exactly perfectly. But the good news is that there are thousands of people who fit us almost perfectly, and thousands more who fit us a little less perfect but still acceptably.

So who we end up with is quite often all in the timing. What order you meet people in. Whether they’re single at the same time you are. Whether they want a relationship at the same time you do. What order they call you on the phone. What order they get up the nerve to ask you out.

Go back in time, change one tiny thing, and odds are you’d end up with a completely different person. And you’d be just as happy with them. Or maybe more! But you have no way of knowing.

Love is not all that romantic when you get down to it.

I read lots of pulp novels from the 1950’s and 60’s. Lesbians were HUGE in those days, as were pirates and aliens. I also really loved rockabilly/psychobilly music, and wanted to start a band. We were going to do a concept album called Girls With Rayguns (I hadn’t even heard of Girls With Slingshots at this point). I came up with a bunch of drawings for album art, but never got around to making any actual music.

But I liked these characters, so I kept sketching them. On one drawing, I wrote “I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space!!!” and liked it so much, I knew it had to be a comic! So I sketched up a few more characters and came up with a storyline for them.

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