About Lesson One: Vampires

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This was the beginning of An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying. The first draft was only about 80 pages and was created a whole decade ago. The final version was finished in 2016 and first published in 2021. It's 154 pages long. We came up with the basic plot after wondering what Fright Night (1985) would be like in a post-Twilight world. The very first scene we thought of was the one where Lisa 'thanks' Tim for saving her. The whole story evolved from this one panel that you can see below.



Tim was originally going to be a veteran vampire hunter, tired of his work, which would make him closer to Peter Vincent (minus the fact that he was a real vampire hunter). However, there are so many similar characters out there already, we decided to go in the opposite direction and smiling, optimistic Tim was born. Penny started out as a very secondary character, but as we developed plot and characters, she and her friends got more to do, and the story itself became more of an ensemble. Maggie is the one who takes the lead in the final version, but Penny was more fun to write for and when we started working on turning this into a series, we made her Tim's co-lead.





Nina didn't exist in the first draft and Cathy wasn't Maggie's sister. Tim's clashes with Vlad, the Impaler, and Erzsébet Bathory were a lot shorter. There was no sploshing. The brother and sister duo, Cesare and Lucrezia, are obviously meant to be the Borgias, but we ended up never naming them. However, in the first draft, Tim recognized them. Lisa remained unchanged throughout all the rewrites. Tim's full moon-induced fluffiness was just a joke at the end of the first draft, which ended with him being chased away by his former allies, but as we developed the series, it became more important.




Lisa and her friends were based on a lot of annoying arguments we saw on online forums about fictional vampires. The problem for us wasn't that some people were fantasizing about what would be very unhealthy relationships in real life, but the way they were defending it. It was pretty creepy seeing people use the same arguments you'd hear defending abusive husbands like, 'Oh, he's only doing it because he cares so much', while trashing the female characters who dared to challenge their TV boyfriend. The way people defended Damon after he killed Elena's little brother right in front of her when she turned him down was insane! In addition to that, we never really liked the use of vampires as a metaphor for minorities. Mutants aren't a perfect fit either, but vampires eat people, FFS. So, there are some vampire 'scholars', too, as you can see below.



In 2022, we converted Lesson One into a webtoon and published it on Webtoon Canvas. It was interesting to break the story into smaller chapters. We already had to choose the best place to end each issue, but this allowed us to control the pacing even more. It felt like making a TV series with several episodes. There were some issues because of the narrower, vertical format of the panels. Here's how one of our wider panels turned out:


Original panel


Webtoon

It doesn't even look like they're in the same place! We never realized how many wide panels we had until then. It did make us wonder whether we've been cramming too much dialogue into each panel and if maybe we shouldn't make some changes to panel size and page layout, which we ended up doing, starting with Book 5. Thinking that it would be unfair to publish the beginning of a series we had no intention to keep publishing on that platform, we created an exclusive Canvas-only standalone version. Near the end, we split the story into Original and Standalone Version, which meant removing panels that set up future plots and characters, and also coming up with a new ending. We kept it simple, but we feel it works well.



Lesson One: Vampires has been split in several different ways. Our original plan was for An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying to be a graphic novel series, each a different 'lesson', hence the title. As you can see from the titles of the other books, that didn't happen. We've currently managed to squeeze all of Lesson One into a single book, which is currently available for free at Kobo's online store.


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