About Rebellion
Rebellion centres on Maggie and Nina's attempt to start their own feminist group but it also features Lisa plotting revenge, a cameo from Maggie's actress sister Cathy, evil pizza, and... tentacles! It takes place after Mummy Issues and overlaps with the next story, Geek Addiction.
You're probably wondering how we ended up with an issue about two supporting characters starting a feminist organization in the middle of a SFF comic book series. Well, it was all because we abandoned our original plans for a graphic novel series. At first, this was just going to be a short interlude between Tim and Penny's individual adventures. The first draft ended with Lisa and her friends. The page with Nina reading Prof Tussmann's books was placed before that and also showed her being told that Marina's American feminist organization had chosen her and Maggie's new group as their sister organization in the UK. However, with the change of plans, we were left with a couple of very short stories that didn't fit anywhere. So, we added stuff until we had enough material to fill a whole issue. At the same time we were writing/drawing Rebellion, we had also begun developing the antagonists and the cast was growing. This meant that any non-essential characters and subplots had to go. One of those non-essential subplots was Maggie and Nina's feminist group. Feminism is important in the real world, but Bob's nefarious plans and motivation are more important for the series. We could always have the characters talk about those issues like we did in Lesson One: Vampires, but we didn't want the obligation to maintain a whole subplot divorced from the main story with a host of tertiary characters involved. So, we decided to nuke it in a believable way that also gave Maggie and Nina something to do on their own and showed more about them.
Rebellion also marks the beginning of Lisa and her friends' revenge plot. They won't be troubling Penny and Tim just yet, but we'll be checking up on them in future issues. For instance, Emma and Carla show up in Penny and the Silver Key Part 1.
Originally, there wasn't any supernatural stuff, but then we came up with the evil pizza epidemic, which will be resolved in Tim's next adventure, and thought it would be funny to show the reaction of the tentacled spawn of Yuggoth to the octopus sex scene.
By the way, it was only after we published Geek Addiction that it occurred to us that the octopus bit and the running gag about dinosaur erotica probably count as bestiality...
