Paint The Town Red is a noir slice-of-life/adventure comic featuring vampires, werewolves and demons of a very queer-femme perspective. The story follows the lives of different characters who fall in love, fight and attempt to co-exist in the town of Merlot despite their obvious differences.
Volume 1(.1) introduces characters: Winona Barlowe, Odile Brady, Victoria Darling and Emerson Pines and their relationships towards one another. Volume 2 introduces a few more integral characters into the fray and the result of Emerson and Winona meeting through their mutual love of Vic.
Intention
This story started with a very dire need, from both Tasha and I, for there to be more vampire and werewolf dramas but with more femme-oriented LGBTQA+ characters. It was honestly pretty straightforward for us.
Although, admittedly, the original intent was that I could weasel my way into collaborating on a story with one of my favourite people of all time.
History & Timeline
You could say Paint The Town Red started in its basic concept with Tasha’s creation of Delilah as a character but that wouldn’t entirely be the whole truth of it. I would say that this story came about a bit after Tasha started doodling Vic and Winny back in 2016. She had had Delilah for a little while before this and was beginning to create a story surrounding these three characters but told me that she wasn’t entirely sure where to go with it. At the time I thought it might be fun to create my own werewolf (Em) and vampire (Jinny) characters to compliment hers so that I can do what any person in a very new relationship would do: pair the characters up and doodle them smooching a whole lot.
It turns out that both of us really started enjoying the dynamics of these characters and were tossing the idea around of turning it into a comic series. We tested our workflow first with a short comic we called: A Tempo and found that even our process fit together like a well oiled machine.
By the end of 2018 we set to work on writing and illustrating our first book (made easiest by the fact that Tasha moved all the way to my side of the country so that we could live together)! We set up our very first crowdfund campaign as a duo for the very first book of our series and were floored by the response from the Kickstarter on to the rest of 2019 where it nearly sold out entirely of its 300 book initial print run!
Volume 2 then launched on Kickstarter in February 2020. The process of crowdfunding was quite painstaking this time since our goal had to involve not only the print of Volume 2 but also the reprint of Volume 1. This partnered with the fact that it was a second volume, a shift in the algorithms on certain platforms we were a part of made reaching this goal an absolutel crawl. But we did it!
Then the global pandemic hit. Delayed our release of the book–
[Paint the Town Red is a project that is still currently ongoing. This page will continue to be updated as the project progresses in real time].