Megan West(erby)

Sleepy Hollow goes Gilmore Girls

We keep saying SLEEPY HOLLOW, 1998 takes inspiration from Gilmore Girls, so it was INCREDIBLY exciting to have John Cabrera, aka an actual RESIDENT of Stars Hollow (Brian Fuller), aka the BEST Hep Alien band member back our Kickstarter. And when he heard how much his show inspired us, he reached out to offer his help! Like, I'm still boggling at this level of NICENESS.

There's a band in Sleepy Hollow, 1998 called THEM BONES. The frontman is the ex-boyfriend of our protagonist's crush and I imbued him with as many Jordan Catalano vibes as reasonable. I don't want to spoil the story, but Them Bones was critical enough to the story that we designed them a whole series of band posters. Here's a piece of one.

section of a Ramones-style Them Bones band poster

And here's the fun part -- John Cabrera has continued to play music with Todd Lowe, who played Zach on Gilmore Girls. In addition to periodic Hep Alien reunion shows, they're working on a new, secret side project. So we asked if we could make their new project a little less secret by adding it to the Sleepy Hollow universe. AND THEY SAID YES.

mockup of a double-header featuring Graysilk and Them Bones

I am particularly excited by being able to offer a SIGNED BAND POSTER as part of our campaign, since I have a collection of band posters torn off the walls of dingy venues from like 1998-2011 that all mean a stupid amount to me. This is a mockup but we WILL take inspiration from my collection before we finalize the art.

Sleepy Hollow, 1998 is a story via letters in the mail, which requires two things: @jaybushman's love of adapting stories from one medium to another and my love of metadata and ephemera. 

I’ve always believed that we can find critical pieces of a story inside metadata. Our brains love making connections; in a narrative, we can’t help but turn the who, why, when, where, what, and how into purposefully structured data points. That structure gives us essential context. Here’s another way of phrasing it: ephemera and marginalia allow us to see how someone tries to give the chaotic world around them some semblance of order. There’s so much story hiding in…stuff.

This 2002 burned CD with attached post-it note from my brother hits me in the feels far more than any journal entry or photograph of that trip ever could:

I never met my great-grandfather, but through the journal he kept during his work travels in 1924, I can know him. 

Perhaps most importantly, I did meet the great-grandmother whose famous “Chocolate Dream Drops” recipe achieved legendary status in my family. But I could never have appreciated her as a person when I was 5 and she was in her 80s. What I have from her is a lifetime of ephemera, in the form of recipes changed over time, and a closer relationship to my mother and grandmother from connecting through those recipes. 

If you’re anything like me, the only things you find in your mailbox now is bills and junk mail. But back in the day I used to write postcards letters, and then sometimes receive the same in return, and those pieces of paper would bring me joy and something to put on the fridge. I want to feel like that again, and I want other people to get to experience that feeling, too, so when @jaybushman mentioned a story adaptation idea he had I jumped at the chance to help make it happen. "Sleepy Hollow, 1998" comes to you, right to your mailbox, over the course of six weeks. Each envelope includes a letter from Ichabod Crane, describing his exploits in Sleepy Hollow. Each envelope also includes an artifact from the storyworld – think sketches, postcards, zines, and placemats. Things that fold up flat into an envelope. Right now we're almost funded on Kickstarter, but I know we're going to keep telling stories by mail because we really want to and we believe there are people out there who want to enjoy receiving mail. This doesn't fall into an easily understandable project category so if this interests you at all I am begging for reblogs, because I'm pretty sure that's how we'll find people who understand what we're trying to do.