I found this the other day. I’d forgotten all about it before now, which is slightly surprising considering I did a good bit of (unpaid) work on the project.

I have no idea if the Suicide Girls website is big or small nowadays, but there was a time when it was very much up and coming. It was a site with (mostly) tasteful nude photos of alt-models, the term referring to hip, alternative girls who had tattoos, piercings, and a punk/emo/arty vibe. I feel like that’s most of the women I meet nowadays but then it was a bit more of a rarity. That said, by the time I was approached to write a potential comic series, it had begun to take hold of the zeitgeist, and it seemed like a fun challenge.

I was first approached by my friend, Gaston Dominguez, who at the time owned and ran Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. Apart from the store, Gaston is a guy with many fingers in many pies, a lot of it involving new limited edition Japanese clothes and toys. Now Meltdown is gone, that’s all he does, it seems, but back then he was in contact with countless hip creatives all over town. I guess two of these were Missy and Sean who run the Suicide Girls website.

I did visit Missy and Sean at the Suicide Girls HQ (basically, a house in Los Feliz/Silverlake, L.A.) but it was Gaston (more than anyone) who pitched me the idea of writing a mini-series to test the water, this being three 48-page graphic novels that were one storyline. The intention was never to have a load of nudity in the book, but rather that the Suicide Girls were all sort of in the same world, going about their lives, meeting at times and at other times with their own dramas. All with a punk, raw, wild, slightly surreal feel. In my head this was going to be a mash-up of Tank Girl, early Jaime Hernandez when Maggie was encountering robots and spaceships when she wasn’t at home with Hopey, as well as some wild ultra-violence like the (at that time recently released) Hard-Boiled comic by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. It was also going to have some heart and the girls were all going to have cool personalities throughout.

As to the girl’s I chose and their aforementioned personalities, as I recall, it took a bit of speculation and guesswork on my part. I tried to make them all cool and likeable in distinctly different ways. I know they probably would all have had to sign off on it, but the project didn’t get that far, so there’s that. But had they seen what I was doing with them, I hope they would have approved and been flattered. Who knows?

I do recall that upon talking with Sean and Missy, after they’d read the outline and before I started on the actual script, that they asked me to change the names/choices of some of the girls, due to some internal stuff going on between them and some of the girls. Hence the differing names of some of them, with the script to Issue #1. 

(I note when I looked something up just now, that IDW Publishing actually did a Suicide Girls comic series in 2011, but this is many years after my effort. I never saw the IDW series nor knew that it came out until this minute thanks to Wikipedia. I’m surprised I missed it at the time, though, as the creators Steve Niles and Cameron Stewart both do great work.)

Anyway, as many freelance writers in both comics and films will tell you, it’s very easy to end up doing speculative work and it be all for nothing. I wrote the outline and the first issue, and then listened to crickets. A while later, maybe a year on, Studio M contacted me, again through Gaston and said they were interested in picking up where I’d left off, but after one confusing phone call it was crickets again.

So here it is, for what it is. I think it would have been fun.