About Tim's Winter Adventure
Earlier this year, we published on Kobo a new book in An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying, and it wasn't Penny and the Silver Key #3. It was a prequel adventure titled Tim’s Winter Adventure. It started as a challenge we set for ourselves - to create a a Christmas-themed monster slaying adventure between 15th December and 6th January. Needless to say, we didn’t meet our self-imposed deadline, but still managed to complete it when people weren’t entirely over Holiday Season yet - 15th January - so, yay, us?
The original title was Tim’s Christmas Adventure and it was first published as several installments on our now defunct WordPress spin-off blog A Goat 4 Zazzie (which was revived here, though sans free digital comic). This offered us an opportunity to recharge our creative batteries and bring back Tim, who started out as the original solo lead of the series and had been absent since Book 2, Mummy Issues, with only a sort of cameo in Penny and the Silver Key Part 1. Some of the elements of the plot had already been floating around in our heads, like Nikki facing a deadly Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Tim meeting the Snow Queen, and the epilogue, which was, ironically, one of the first complete sequences we came up with. All of this originated from a 2022 Christmas tweet showing how different Tim and Penny’s respective Christmases were, and which you can see below.
At the time, it was just a joke - of course Tim had had to kill Santa at some point - but then we started to think about how he had got there. We decided pretty early on to include Ben, Tim’s monster slaying mentor, and his daughter Nikki, who made their debut in Mummy Issues. Actually fleshing out all of those ideas and turning them into a coherent whole wasn’t as simple as we thought it would be, though. The episodic nature of the story - both versions are split into 5 parts/chapters - made it easier as did the fact that it’s a pretty straightforward rescue mission. However, new characters meant more work, as did the fact that the laptop used to make the previous books was replaced and holy shit, did the change in image resolution make a difference in terms of colours! We had already decided that there was some need for revision of skin tones, but this made it clear we couldn’t wait (this of course involved correcting the previous books, too, excluding Lesson One: Vampires, as most of it was made using only one layer). We think that maybe we made the white characters a little too pale, but there won’t be any more colour changes. This was also the first book made from scratch using the new layout, so expect more full-page panels and a more dynamic display of character conversations. Moving on, the first new characters we had to create were Krampus and Rudolph. Naturally, Krampus involved more work. Here you can see his first appearance in Chapter 1: The Naughty List.
This first chapter also marked the comic book series debut of Theodore Stoker, whom you may recall as the ‘author’ of The Heavenly Journey of Brother Lucas. We thought he’d be perfect to do a little exposition on Krampus to Nikki, her father, and Tim (and the readers).
The seasonal goat demon’s most recognizable feature is that creepy tongue and some attempts were made to show it in this story, but while it remains mostly visible and even gets used for more practical purposes, the most important thing for us about our Krampus were his hands. Their movements set his demeanour and helped us picture how he moved and even talked. This is clearer in Chapter 4: The Tale of Krampus.
Rudolph was surprisingly easy to draw and all it took were some red eyes and blood on his snout to make him look like the cannibalistic, puppy-eater we wanted as another easily recognizable Christmas-related threat.
Santa’s Elves weren’t that difficult either, thanks in part to the wonders of copy/pasting, which meant that as soon as one was finished, all it took were a few modifications to get those 6 little psychos.
The character who necessitated more work was Selene, the Snow Queen. Most people will likely not notice - hell, we also find it hard to believe - but she’s made up of a lot of different layers. We tried to add a little something to her and her home’s icy colour scheme to make it all look less white, but we ended up with a lot of very pale blues and it all turned out very subtle.
While the general aesthetic was obviously taken from Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, her personality was partly inspired by Lady Envy from the Malazan series (Erikson’s portrayal, not Esslemont’s crappy attempt to prop up that blandness void Fisher kel Tath). Unfortunately, Chapter 2: The Snow Queen was where our best laid plans got derailed and we got to a point where we just wanted it to end - it was taking too much of what was meant to be a wackier story and we were still deluded enough to believe we could meet the 6th January deadline. If we hadn’t been publishing it as we were creating it, things might’ve been different. Still, Selene will be back so there’ll be more opportunities to fully showcase her personality. Reading this chapter now that it’s all finished, we can see it’s not really that long, and it also gave us the chance to do some pure Fantasy.
The book as a whole is less grounded in the real world than the previous ones, even if Tim and Ben are technically in the North Pole, and the art reflects that. Don’t expect some ultra-elaborate set pieces, but it definitely looks less simplistic than Lesson One thanks to Clip Studio Paint and Corel Painter Essentials' brushes, layers, gradients, and other tools. Others could’ve done a lot more with these resources, but we like how it turned out.
If Chapter 2: The Snow Queen was Fantasy, there’s a lot here that’s just plain Horror. For us, who were thinking of Tim killing Santa and already planning the confrontation with the elves, this was another slice of dark humour like Lesson One, but much of it is missing the humour and wouldn’t be out of place in any horror story. The sequence that took us back to the book that started it all was Tim VS Santa’s elves. It was fun to do that again, even if we understand that not everyone will find the idea of Tim fighting half a dozen cannibalistic elves who look like little kids after shanking Santa with a half-chewed candy cane as amusing as we do.
Making a prequel is always a little risky because there’s a chance that you could end up contradicting already established canon. The only other prequel we made (and haven’t published yet) - Antigone: Zombie Revenge - didn’t have that problem because it was set in Ancient Greece, but here we’re dealing with characters from the current series. Naturally, our biggest concern was Tim. Lesson One made it seem as if he spent most of his life stuck in the Order’s secret headquarters, which accounted for his lack of knowledge of Pop Culture. However, here he’s out and about in London, visiting Nikki with her father. We think we can get away with saying that this was a rare occurrence and that monster slayers tend to not spend time with civilians in the outside world. At least during their training and in the first years - after all, Ben got married and had a kid - and maybe his mentor is an exception? Yeah, we think that works. Tim certainly didn’t say anything to contradict his characterization so far. We did drop the more formal and archaic way of speaking, but since he’s still in training and interacts mostly with Ben, we didn’t think it would make sense for him to use it. Honestly, we’re kinda regretting that little quirk, even if it was explained as the monster slayers’ way to more easily ensure the civilians’ cooperation during an emergency. It started out as fun, but it’s hard to maintain. The story also allowed us to show more of Ben and Nikki and their relationship with Tim, which will make the fact that the Elders sent them after him more interesting. This, however, also made her reactions in Mummy Issues seem too cold. Since, no one ever bought the now de-listed Mummy Issues #2, we managed to correct that. (See? People not reading your books isn’t always a bad thing!) In addition to giving more page-time to already known characters, Tim’s Winter Adventure introduced a character that was going to make his debut in Penny and the Silver Key #3. The events of Epilogue: The Scapegoat are part of his backstory and were going to be shown as a flashback later on, but we didn’t want to wait. Oh, and while we say ‘introduced’, if you read the third issue of Penny’s yet unfinished adventure, you’ll see that that’s not exactly the first time he showed up. We’d love to say more, but spoilers aren’t good for business.
When it came to publishing it on Kobo’s online store, we decided it was better to change the title and ‘Christmas’ became ‘Winter’, to make it less specific. In the plot description, we added a warning for 'implied puppy-eating, ordinary violence, ocular violence, violence against animals (basically Rudolph, but he ate a puppy, so…), and cannibalism mentions'. It was meant as a joke rather than a genuine trigger warning, though it’s actually pretty accurate. By the way, it was thanks to this book that we realized that the EPUB files were now smaller (new laptop? Some CSP software update?) and we finally managed to put the smaller issues together as books. This is probably the closest we’ll ever be to our original plan of releasing An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying as a series of graphic novels.
