About Penny and the Silver Key #3
Completing Penny and the Silver Key #3 wasn't as easy as we'd hoped even though we knew where we wanted it to end and had a pretty good idea of how we wanted to get there. The basic outline stayed the same, but the characters were pretty different. Originally, this was going to be a quiet moment for Penny before continuing her search for a way back to her world, but as we developed it, things got progressively darker. This must be the least humorous book we've ever created. There is some humour, but very little. In Penny and the Silver Key Part 1 we turned baby-eating lizard people into a dark comedy moment, but not here. The future isn't fun. Penny and the Silver Key #3 will also reveal more about the King in Yellow.
We got the idea for part of it thanks to a conversation with a cosmic horror-themed account we follow on Twitter/X (@avatar_chaos) about Chambers' original stories. In hindsight, the religious elements were pretty obvious (the play is even bound in snakeskin!), but it pushed us to think deeper about the madness caused by the play and if there was more to it.
As you can see from the panel above and the one below, this future is stabby (also, ocular violence!).
Penny will be seeing some more familiar faces, but things have changed a lot. Her time with the human resistance gave us the opportunity to do some world-building and explain more or less how it got to this. We had many ideas for how things could go, but in the end one character (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) stood out and became the centre of the new story. That came out clunky, but we can't give everything away, can we?
In Penny and the Silver Key #3, we’re finally going to introduce a couple of characters who were meant to make their debut in Rebellion and then in Penny and the Silver Key Part 1, but now will show up here first. We had this sequence more or less planned since the beginning - in fact, it was one of the things that suffered the least changes. At first, it was only going to be a panel, but we felt that there wasn't enough room for everything and gave them a whole page. They'll turn up again in Penny and the Silver Key #4 in a vastly different setting. They're Jeong-ho and David, and we had plans to do a spin-off of their time in Silicon Valley, but now that's likely not happening. You can learn a little more about them on their wiki page.
In the next panel, you can see Penny meeting a certain floofy cat. Zazzie has already turned up in Geek Addiction and Penny and the Silver Part 1, but now we’re going to reveal his secrets (which anyone who's been to the spin-off blog already knows). By the way, Zazzie also has a wiki page.
Penny's adventure will end with the 4th issue, but for now, here's the cover of Penny and the Silver Key #3.
