when did u decide to bring aeschylus back, as it were? cuz i remember u saying a lot that he wouldnt come back
TBH i'm not really sure! it must have been in the first-ish year of working on FFAK so thats over 10 years ago. From what I remember, I had already sketched a humanoid version of him for the flashbacks and got more attached to the idea because people kept drawing fanart of him from ch10. I think because I thought about it so much I got ideas for what I would do if he did, so it ended up happening. That also happened with Galore, who I also did not plan to return but got swayed by how popular she was for readers.
Nail on the other hand, was always meant to be a weed character who returned from the dead after being killed from Simon. That was going to be the basis of the character and also help establish weeds as this predator TO worms, kind of completing this "food chain" idea I wanted to have for FFAK. I ended up wanting him to have other characters to interact with, so having Aeschylus (and later Randall) be ones that readers were already familiar with being janitors with him was a fun enough idea that I ended up going with it in the end. I also really liked his weed design, frankly. Stupid jokes will win me over and many things i start out "as a joke" end up happening for real if I speculate on it enough.. Like Nasty Red Dogs as an entire comic (spawned from me thinking about what I'd do for a zombie comic. You know, as a joke.)
IMO I actually do think the characters were probably better to have died (narratively speaking) for impact/loss but I also feel glad to have gone through it to understand what works and what doesnt for making that kind of choice. Sometimes deaths are meant to be permanent, others are built in to not be the case (like Nail.) I think that you can always find an excuse/reason to bring someone back but it is always harder to commit to a death when you were not going to. It's natural to go through your own grieving process in a way, especially if you can always think of new ideas/scenes for them that would be interesting to explore.
So having a character like Rock felt like a turning point in being a writer where I was following through with that choice, although Rock was never a popular character like Aeschylus or Galore were haha. It helped also with NRD and other characters I've written that I felt like I was slipping into that habit to excuse myself from doing what needed to be done.
In any case, it will still be hard to do as we reach major characters in FFAK. I won't say what ones obviously - and it isn't all of them! But.. there are some pretty major deaths. Thankfully FFAK is so long it will take a while to get there, however lol.