With the release of Dead Teenagers from Oni Press on the 18th March, we are delighted to be joined by GLAAD Award-nominated writer Jude Ellison S. Doyle and Eisner Award-nominated artist Caitlin Yarsky. Jude is a journalist, author and comics writer. Caitlin is a writer/artist who has worked on many comic books, including Coyotes, Bliss, Black Hammer Reborn, Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Living Hell.
Hi Jude and Caitlin, it’s great to have you both here with us. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
JUDE: My name is Jude Doyle, though I publish as Jude Ellison S. Doyle just to make things more difficult, and I’m a comic writer who’s done several limited series, including Maw and (most recently) Be Not Afraid, both with Boom! Studios. I’m also a journalist and a non-fiction author sometimes. Dead Teenagers is my first comic with Oni.
CAITLIN: Hi! My name is Caitlin Yarsky and I’m a comic book artist and writer. I was the artist for Image’s Coyotes and Bliss, and the main artist on Black Hammer Reborn for Dark Horse. I’ve done art for DC’s Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Shazam and Superman, and I just wrote/drew my first solo series for Dark Horse called Living Hell.
Can you tell us about the origins of Dead Teenagers?
JUDE: I grew up on ‘90s horror – there was a big boom in slashers, particularly, around the time I started high school, with Scream and The Craft coming out right on top of each other – and I had always wanted an excuse to revisit that era. I’ve done a lot of very dark, emotionally brutal cosmic horror, and something about slashers just feels so light and free and fun by comparison. I was also sort of reckoning with the fact of mortality, that everybody dies, and that some people’s deaths are allowed to matter and others aren’t. These poor slasher teens who are just born to get killed with a pole through the head or get electrocuted in a hot tub for our amusement felt like really interesting vehicles to explore that.
Jude, what can you tell us about J.T., Ryder, Brandy, Alicia and Morgan?
JUDE: These five teens have been trapped in Prom Night, 1997, for 11,000 time loops in a row – if you assume each prom is one night, that means about thirty years in our time. They’ve been killed over and over and over, to the point that they’re almost numb to it, and the deaths follow a pattern: Someone always dies first. Someone else always has the goriest death. Someone else always dies heroically. One girl never dies. Everyone has a little role they’ve been slotted into, within their universe, and they’re testing which decisions they can make to break the loop. So far, nothing has worked.
Caitlin, you created all of the art for the Dead Teenagers. What part of that process did you enjoy the most?
CAITLIN: There’s a lot of humor interspersed throughout this maelstrom of horror, and I have a lot of fun with that. Character acting is my favorite part of drawing comics in general, so hitting the right notes with facial expressions and gestures to amplify the feeling of the scene is really satisfying.
How long have you been working on Dead Teenagers?
JUDE: I wrote this and Be Not Afraid almost simultaneously, starting the winter of 2023. There was a while between the pitch getting greenlit and the time it needed to start, so I’ve been working on it for about two years now. Out of all the scripts I’ve worked on, it was the most complex and it needed the most careful revision process – like, I have a whole highlighted document of time loop scenarios, so that I know which ones come in which order, and I don’t accidentally repeat a number or anything. But it was also the most fun, so I think I just liked messing with it on some level.
Caitlin, what reference materials did you use in order to get that ’90s-era look?
CAITLIN: I had plenty stored up from my own experiences, as I was born in ‘85 and remember how the 90’s looked and felt. I pulled from Delia’s catalogues and People Magazine, shows like Charmed and Buffy, and of course all the teen movies from that period. It was super nostalgic for sure.
Jude, can you tell us about the world in which Dead Teenagers is set?
JUDE: It felt important to set prom in the late ‘90s, because I am more familiar with the embarrassing aspects of that time period. Like, I think the early ‘90s are the most glamorous era in history, but that’s because I was a kid. I wanted these kids to exist in a world with TRL and butt-rock and DeLiA’s and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Having those little grounding details of teenage cringe gives us more of a grounding, so when the comic really takes off and I’m just sending people to space or having them get killed by a dinosaur with the brain of Ayn Rand, it feels more like it’s happening to real people.
Caitlin, the first issue has so much going on in it. Has illustrating Dead Teenagers been fun?
CAITLIN: It’s been a lot of fun and unusually challenging. The biggest hurdle was all the crowd scenes of course; deciding which angles work best and how much detail to give everyone. It’s also been a challenge to keep track of the physical character traits and outfits of the main group.
Jude, Dead Teenagers features a time loop. Can you tell us about how this time loop works in Dead Teenagers?
JUDE: I can, but almost anything I say is going to spoil it! It’s not immutable. It can break. It can malfunction. Those malfunctions are not always predictable. That’s what I’ll say.
Do you think readers will discover who the killer is before issue five?
JUDE: I have an ongoing bet with myself about whether I’ve been subtle enough. I think some readers are going to catch on to it before others, and it will be interesting to see who picks up on it first.
What can you tell us about Dead Teenagers?
JUDE: It’s the first comic I’ve ever written that is explicitly aimed at being fun, or at recreating what I love about comics: Like, there’s banter. There’s a team of misfits who all differ from each other in signature ways, but become a family. There are bright colors and kaiju and big action moments. It felt like it was time, right now, to do something that felt like a big exhale – something that’s actually going to bring you joy before it punishes you with horror, which of course it eventually does.
Any message for the ComicBuzz readers?
JUDE: I’m honored that you read all the way to the end of this interview. The book is better than my answers, I hope.
We would like to say a big thank you to Jude and Caitlin for chatting with us and wish them the best of luck with the release of Dead Teenagers.
