I think there’s kind of an unspoken social contract with both the lone boys in these groups: they wholeheartedly embrace being in girl bands — and, in turn, they’re not excluded from any team activity on the grounds that it’s Just For The Girls. Honey wouldn’t even think of not inviting Zero to this thing.
PS: check out this thing I made as an exercise in representing these characters iconically with minimal detail: (click for actual size)
Lucky comic number 33! This song’s been kicking around in my sketchbook getting re-written over and over for months, and I’m glad I finally found a place for it. It’s also got a Part 2 that I’m looking forward to drawing, but I think I’m going to shift gears back to the Candy Hearts next — I’ve totally been neglecting them due to the Sourballs being pretty much my favorite. I’m enough of a dork about this that I have detailed notes about every character (like, the bible of what traits they have, and what dynamics they have with others, and the strict rules of what they aren’t), and I definitely have the most written about Turpentine and Arsenic.
Oh, yeah, and the other thing I wanted to mention was how much I like drawing extra background characters in this world — they mostly have this thing going on where they need to look…fun…in order to be visually consistent with the main characters. Pretty much everybody dresses with this sort of fusion of the 90s, the 80s, and a bin full of costume parts.
So, not the best night for Perhaps The Only Totally Heterosexual Guy In The World. I guess Billy the intrepid reporter is potentially-maybe in the same club, since he was also fruitlessly hitting on Turpentine.
The girls, meanwhile, remain relatively ambiguous. Except for our two heroines, of course.
Also: you may remember Turpentine and Arsenic’s crummy, unspacious apartment from the one where they watched bad shark movies.
Also II: Operation Keep This Marker Graffiti Relatively Consistent is like: so far, so good.
So, when we last left this roughly-continuous episode, the Sourballs got drunk and drew on each other with markers, and Turpentine kinda ended up on the floor. And now, our pal Atomic Domme gets a little moment in the spotlight — and no, we’re not going to actually see this. The next one jumps forward in time.
PS: Here’s Mina Loy on a tumblr called Hotties From History. I debated quite a bit about which historical figure Domme would want to talk about in this totally-outta-left-field sort of way, but she seemed right. Additional educational notes, in case you’re interested: Loy never published her feminist manifesto in her lifetime, possibly because some of it gets into troubling pseudo-fascist territory that’s otherwise not typical of the author. I like a lot of the rest of it, though — she’s one of my favourite early 20th century figures. Oh, yeah, and the erotic poetry isn’t particularly scandalous…but hey, I guess it was in 1915.
I had the next comic more than halfway done when I had this idea, and could not resist doing it first.