About Penny and the Silver Key Part 1

Penny and the Silver Key takes place some time after Geek Addiction. Penny just wants everything to go back to normal, but naturally, the universe has other plans. Bob, Supreme Ruler of the Dreamlands, is looking for the next recipient of the Silver Key, which has the power to send whoever uses it to a world where all their wishes have come true... or into the hungry, tentacled embrace of the ancient beings who inhabit the space between worlds. Guess which happens more often. Bob and his Silver Key made their debut in Mummy Issues, and things didn't turn out so well for the previous user of the Key. Now, it's Penny's turn...

This story is the 5th adventure in the An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying series and the second one starring Penny. It's also the first time we've started publishing before finishing the whole story. Rest assured, dear prospective reader, we know very well where we want this to go. However, it's still a little scary for us. In addition to letting Penny kick some ass, Penny and the Silver Key does two other very important things: introduces the existence of alternate timelines, and expands the gallery of cosmic-level threats, giving Bob and the Silicon Valley cultists some very powerful competition.

The first half of Penny and the Silver Key Part 1 is a bit quiet. Penny is just hanging out with her friends, Maggie and Nina, and getting into some awkward situations. We also finally managed to give her and Alan some alone time. Nothing naughty, they're just watching The Usual Suspects for the first time. Still, we haven't shown them together since Lesson One: Vampires, so that was an improvement. This was initially published as its own separate issue, Penny and the Silver Key #1, but then we put it and Penny and the Silver Key #2 in a single volume, as Part 1. The original issue still exists, but we changed its name to Penny and the Silver Key Preview. It was difficult to promote this first issue and try to create some suspense over whether Penny was going to use the Key or not. Of course she will! Otherwise there would be no story. There is some fantasy, namely that cool image of Bob that we've been dying to use. In fact, since this story will be less grounded in reality than the previous ones, an effort was made to create more fantastical-looking images. We even decided to change the background of the Bob panel from the original dull night sky to a fiery, more cosmic-looking pink. Corel Painter got more use than before, as did Clip Studio Paint's many tools. Someone more skilled might've been able to do better, but we're happy with the results.

The Bob panel isn't the only one that we'll finally be able to use. Readers will also be seeing more of Takagi's rope work, which we've already posted on social media. Penny's mysterious ally (or was it enemy) from Dr Lem's geek rehab clinic will also be showing a bit more of himself. Takagi isn't the only familiar face Penny will see, but looks can be deceiving in the crazy new world the Silver Key unlocked. Penny and the Silver Key #3 is where we'll start explaining things about this world, which offers many opportunities for screwing up and messing up the whole series. It's also where a certain floofy cat is scheduled to appear and we're going to reveal what's the deal with Zazzie's Facebook account + Simone's crypto currency, Goat, which, like Takagi, were introduced in Geek Addiction.

The biggest challenge was one we created for ourselves: changing the page layout and panel size, plus breaking the occasionally wordy dialogue to make everything easier to see on a tablet or e-reader. That nearly doubled the number of pages and forced us to find a way to make scenes with a lot of dialogue look more dynamic.

As you can see above, with just a few changes, a sequence consisting of Penny sitting in front of a computer ends up looking a lot less boring. It also made the progression of her changing emotions clearer. There will be a lot more full-page panels than before, and close-ups, too. So, the baby-eating lizard person, who was an image in the background of the original panel, got its own panel in the new version when we split the baby-eating and Penny's reaction to it, which is now shown in the next panel. We kinda prefer the original, but the new version is much more visible on a smaller screen. Sometimes, it is only a matter of enlarging the original panel or just splitting it, but it has become increasingly necessary to make more changes and re-draw some things, which wasn't something we had anticipated.

We also had to rewrite some shockingly weird dialogue. Did we really write that or did some mischievous creature replaced our Shakespearean brilliance with trash? We had stopped writing this story all the way back in 2021, and since then, we have been busy publishing the previous adventures in the series and turning Lesson One into a webtoon. Instead of starting to convert what started out as Penny and the Silver Key #2 to the new format after finishing the first issue, we started working on Penny and the Silver Key #3. We should've gone over what we had already done, but didn't. This meant that we kinda missed the fact that Penny had already theorized at length about what the hell was going on, which made several important scenes in #3 redundant. Fortunately, since #2 hadn't been published yet, we could just change it. Honestly, that was actually for the best, because having Penny figuring everything out right in the beginning wasn't a good choice. We also found out we weren't as crazy about some of the things we had originally planned, but while we were able to ditch most of them, there's an important plot point, which we'll be hinting at here, that we just can't drop. Hopefully, by the time we have to explain it, we'll have gone back to loving it.

And how will Penny fare in this dystopian nightmare where heroes become villains, friends become foes, lizard people eat babies, literary cosmic menaces are real, and Humankind has lost the war for Earth?

The above is from a scene in Penny and the Silver Key #3, but a lot is going to happen before that...