Goth House Comics

Note: on Friday the Thirteenth I always tried to post a dream sequence to Goth House, usually a nightmare. I had this idea that I would finally start doing regular Goth House comics again, and I really tried to make it work, but the idea I had wasn’t a dream and that started to bug me. So I thought about this dream that I had back in August that has been haunting me ever since. I was at the house and Dad arrived with Mom. I was a little bit confused. “Dad, why are you here now, I thought you were coming back with me after I go to Los Angeles.” He didn’t really have an explanation, we just started chatting. Then it hit me all of a sudden: this had to be a dream. Not only was Mom better, she was ALL better. And she was young again. She had a short haircut she hasn’t had for decades. But everyone else was acting like it was normal, so I decided to just roll with it. My brothers were there. It was Christmas. There was a tree in the corner, and a couch next to the tree. The couch was green, a little Victorian in its style, and I thought, “I know this is a dream, no way would mom ever own a couch like that.” But I kept on rolling with it. We were watching a Simpsons episode. It was a holiday episode. The celebrity guest voice — Alyssa Milano, I think — was playing a ghost in some kind of mash-up of A Nightmare on Elm Street and A Christmas Carol. My Mom made a comment about the guest star. I was surprised she knew who it was. (was it Alyssa Milano?) By now I was even more sure it had to be a dream, because — Whenever I looked at the Christmas tree — It had changed. I told myself, “Stop worrying, you’d enjoy this if it was a David Lynch movie.” In the dream, I started to cry. But I also started to try to make it last, too. To stay in the dream, as it was fading. I had the thought, “Wait, none of our pets are here.” I woke up, still crying, and realized no spouses or children had been there either. And it wasn’t our house, not any of our houses where we ever lived. It was a place I’d never been.

Inspired by this Washington Post article: Quarantine is endless dirty dishes. It was always a running joke in the Goth House comic that the house, in spite of being inhabited by a bunch of gothy posers who acted as if they survived entirely on coffee and cigarettes (and possibly blood), the kitchen was always full of dirty dishes, and nobody would own up to being responsible.

Hey everybody! I wanted to revive the tradition of publishing a Goth House nightmare on Friday the 13th, but since everything in real life is pretty nightmarish right now, I was having trouble figuring out a script. I looked through the archives for inspiration, and saw this: Owen’s Nightmare, originally published — according to notes — on July 5, 2005, which wasn’t a Friday the 13th so I don’t know what was up with that. Owen, along with his wife Peaches (her real name) were recurring characters in Goth House world, evangelists who would sometimes show up to denounce Halloween or rock music or goth culture in general. I thought it would be funny to draw HIS nightmare. At the time I posted the original Owen’s Nightmare, I was experimenting with different ways of presenting an online comic, and it was done in a horizontal scrolling style that would look terrible on a smart phone. So, I sliced the images differently and did a little cleanup work to make that work. Otherwise, this is exactly the script from 2005, which has an eerie similarity to modern events. I added one image. See if you can spot it.

Back when I was updating the comic regularly, I liked to do nightmares whenever a Friday the Thirteenth came around. Here it is, the first published Goth House Comic since… uh… 2009? Really? That long? The backstory here is based on a project I’m still PLANNING to do someday, which is finish out the story of the rise and fall of the band. The upshot is that after a rise and fall and a bunch of other events, the old Goth House crew ends up sharing a house together again, in Seattle this time, for money reasons. Some of them have teenage children even. Hijinks ensue!

Originally published 2008, not sure what time of year. The characters are me and my husband, not the Goth House characters. The files are all called “Night” so I guess that’s the name of the comic? Which is weird because I don’t actually remember and there isn’t a title page. When I was drawing the comic regularly, I would always try to post a nightmare on a Friday the Thirteenth. This comic is based on a nightmare I had. My zombie, vampire, and nuclear war nightmares always seem to end pretty much like this, with a weird semblance of normalcy restored.  

Originally posted in 2003 after the series ended.

Originally published March 20, 2003. The first panel is because I interrupted an ongoing storyline with all the Goth House characters reimagined as supervillains, in order to write about the Iraq Invasion. The first phrase “I rarely get topical with the comic” doesn’t mean that I rarely got political. Mocking the religious right was always a feature, for example. However, when I started the comic I imagined it taking place in a timeless sort of gothic punk world, reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s work. Only his world stops around 1953 and mine stopped around 1983. ——— I rarely get topical with the comic, but sometimes…

(Originally published December 24, 2005)

And of course the epilogue, which I drew in November of 2004, after the election:

A reprint of a series I originally drew in August 2004:

A reprint of a series I originally drew in August 2004:

A reprint of a series I originally drew in August 2004: