SLAY! / The Girlfriend Survives
I am running a
Zoop with two creative teams, making two fun, exciting, and progressive comics for adult audiences. If you love indie comics and/or love anything I've written, I think you should support it. I'm gonna tell you why, but first, the link: zoop.gg/c/slay
If somehow you've gotten here and you don't know me - HI! I'm Jeremy Whitley and I am a comic book writer. I am the creator of Princeless, it's spinoff Raven Pirate Princess, School for Extraterrestrial Girls and the Stonewall honored Navigating with You. I am known for writing diverse YA books
You may also know me from some of my IP work like Marvel's Unstoppable Wasp, Gwenpool's Asexual coming out story, in continuity Sea of Thieves comics, and sixty issues of My Little Pony comics. I've made it my business to find ways to tell diverse original stories in existing worlds. It's what I do.
Working in IP stuff can be fun. Working on my own YA and kids aimed books is often a great time, but friends I love horror, I love dark fantasy, I love stories about heroines who screw up, take punches, keep going and survive against all odds. That's what these books are about zoop.gg/c/slay
And that was the dawn of the blood drenched, monster hunting, post-apocalyptic western story about coming-of-age and female mentorship that is SLAY! Aesthetically, I've always loved westerns, but with few exceptions, they are stories about western American expansion and indigenous genocide. There are a lot of movies that attempt to reframe that and tell more complex stories, but when you center the white cowboy or settler, there's only so much reframing you can do. There are types of people that, if you're staying within the bounds of history, are rarely or never part of that story.
But what I love about westerns is the feeling of isolation - of people being on the edge of the world that your people know and never knowing what sort of monster could be just around the corner. That's the root of horror. The unknown. And add fantasy monsters, anything's possible
A few years back my friend and artist Alex Smith and I started working on SLAY! The idea was a post-apocalyptic western with heroes with looks and backgrounds that played off ideas westerns love, but that don't look or feel quite like characters we've ever seen in these roles. Like The Scarred Rider
You've seen some of these ideas before. A lone badass with no name, known only by a title. They work alone. They have a mysterious past but a legendary reputation. They've been through it all and have the scars to prove it. But I had never seen this character in a western as a black woman and well...
If I am being absolutely real, all of the people I know in my life that have that kind of resolve, self-reliance, and absolute refusal to die even when the world is against them are black women. Rider has a quest she keeps to herself, a shame she's itching to avenge, and a history that haunts her.
Now, as with many of you, my favorite dynamic between two leads is gloomy and stoic teamed with enthusiastic and overconfident. That's where Leilah Jilani comes in. Leila lost her mother when she was young and has grown up being cared for by the old woman that maintained their local mosque.
The only thing Leilah still has of her mother's is a necklace. Leilah never knew what this necklace meant until she saw this symbol again recently and discovered that it used to be the symbol of a group of legendary monster slayers that rode with a great queen, protecting their valley from monsters.
Leilah, of course, wants to be like her mother so rushes out of her otherwise sheltered life to find someone who can teach her to become a hero like her mother. All the others are rumored to be dead and gone, except for one woman who is like a ghost, still out there questing, The Scarred Rider. As it happens, there are other people out there looking for Rider, people who need a monster slain. Well, that seems to Leilah like an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Go where Rider may be headed AND claim a bounty so she can keep looking. Easy peasy.
The only problem, as you may have guessed, is that she's not actually a trained monster hunter yet and so now has put herself in the crosshairs of both this monster and The Scarred Rider herself. Even surviving is going to be a challenge, forget convincing Rider to mentor her. zoop.gg/c/slay
