Milk & Cheese Archive: Notes For An Unproduced Goth Comic

I'm depressed and amazed at how much time I spent making notes for potential Milk & Cheeses comics back in the 90s and whatever we call that hazy decade that was 2000-2010. The files I have on these things are about two inches thick. I guess the files add some to that, but still. I crapped out on making Milk & Cheese #Hate due to burnout and working on World's Funnest and then the Eltingville pilot. I never got back to them regularly other than briefly for the House of Fun sections I did for Dark Horse Presents, which included five or six new M&C pages

I never dipped into the old files for ideas for those later stories, so the notes just sat and gathered dust. And most of them aged like cheap wine with the top twisted off. The topics are outdated, or the approaches don't work for me now, or both. This Goth springboard is at least twenty-five years too late to do as originally planned. Now I'd lean more heavily on the phony vampire hunt than a straight-out bashing of the goth subculture (although I'd sideswipe it more than a few times, I think). It would be like doing a disco strip. Or making fun of industrial music. The swing music revival. Etc.

The file is relatively dense, I threw a lot of notes and reference material into it. I just recycled a batch of notes that were super-weak or dated. I'm still keeping the file, because, if nothing else, as with all of the springboards, there's a lot of one-liners and bits of business that still work and could be plucked out and used in another story, if not a reworked version of the original theme. Most of these will never get used even if I ever return to drawing new comics, but one or two might sneak out onto a few sheets of Bristol board someday. Never say never.

I do like the idea of M&C running around as grim reapers, that would be fun to draw. And fake Van Helsings vampire-hunting modern goth kids. More for the dumb action and jokes than the scene-trashing. With the rise of pop culture and social media since the 90s, professionals and amateurs have pretty much trashed everything to death.

Maybe there's a M&C strip about that. Possibly. I probably won't draw it, though.

Anyway, enjoy all the old notes and bad jokes. You can envision the comic in your mind, I bet!