Psst. Billy. That’s not the only reason.

D’awww. Supportive friends. This has kinda been their core all along — they like the idea of being the “bad” band in this whole nominal good/bad dynamic, and they’re troublemakers and frequently unwholesome…but they’re so not bad people.

The title I gave one actually comes from this Life in Hell comic, which is what I was thinking about way back when I named the band (plus, I suppose, wanting the candy parallel with The Candy Hearts.) I’m not sure it’s what I’d go for again if I was naming them now (or if I’d known then that this was going to go for well over 100 pages, instead of like five), but what the heck. I think that’s similar to how they think about it in-universe — like, this band name probably has some kind of half-forgotten silly origin, but by now they’re all attached to it and used to it.

Re: Domme: this was actually not the intention from Day 1 (tho it’s been canon in my mind for probably the majority of the run of these comix), and I really debated whether it was somehow Not Legit to have a trans character who was not originally, specifically created as such. Where I’m at now is that I kinda like the idea that it’s not her main trait in the universe, and everything that’s *more* central to this character’s role (deadpan snarker, academic grad student, comparatively elegant force for order when her bandmates are being particularly chaotic and scruffy, probably into some manner of kink or at least likes to project that aesthetically) was established first.

It’s bugged me for ages that my super-stylized, friendly, heavily-populated-with L, G, B, and Q characters comixworld might be accidentally perceived as somewhere my T friends/readers were not invited due to no representation. Not so.

Sorry that this one was so late, by the way! I can’t entirely BLAME this, but it may have been a factor that at one point this weekend my apartment building was actually on fire.

I almost can’t believe I’ve never done any Halloween-themed BVBs. Basically, the two most significant seasons in my calendar are Halloween and Pride (with some not-insignificant aesthetic overlap.)

Honey’s costume came from a very specific train of thought I had a few weeks ago: “Man, imagine how much fun it would be to dress up as the girl who becomes THE COOKIE QUEEN in this weird old cartoon. …Except for the fact that the odds of anybody recognizing it at a party are…not good.”

This one makes me want to talk a little bit about continuity and status quo in the Band Vs. Bandverse. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I knew almost right from the beginning that I *didn’t* actually want this to be a Status Quo Frozen Universe — either the kind where nothing ever changes, or the kind where plot developments have no significance due to everything always resetting back to square one. The balance, though, is that BVB does have this episodic format that revolves a lot around establishing patterns, and it kinda references a bunch of mostly-frozen universes like, say, Archie.
For this page, when the bands meet again after a summer of not being directly versus each other, I wanted to do a *really* Back To Square One thing — like, the most basic BVB scenario. They’re all out in a public place, and Turpentine’s vaguely up to no good, and Honey Hart’s got a PSA lesson to bring up…and things *have* changed somewhat for these characters over about 130 pages, but this moment has a certain veneer of acting like they haven’t.

I’m blanking on what to write. Tired. Zzz.