Mr. Rogson doesn’t like people practicing casting in his Home Economics class. Save that for Mischievous Spellcraft 101. I love that bottom panel – so many unanswered questions. Is that succubus being nice to that guy and/or mean to the cheerleaders? Is she being mean to the guy? Is she being mean to someone who likes that guy? Why is the succubus not a cheerleader? You’d think she would be one. Is she messing with the cheerleaders cause she’s not on the team? Do demons even go to high school? Could I totally write a comic called Demon High? Ok that one isn’t unanswered. I totally could. Oh and the angel? She’s an exchange student. Daddy’s a progressive archangel and he thought it’d be a good idea, so naturally she made herself head cheerleader. The demonettes aren’t all that happy about it, but she has her halo already. Normally angels don’t get them that young, the have to choose a profession first and that determines the kind of halo you get and what powers come with it, but mom’s a Valkyrie and she pulled some strings. (Or threatened to garrote someone with their own harp strings.) No daughter of hers is going to the nether boroughs without protection. Apparently it does not protect her from succubus charm spells though. Geeze, this stuff writes itself.

Normally I wouldn’t point out Dabbler sitting in the back of the room, cause I like saving that sort of stuff for the more eagle eyed among you, but I will this time cause I wanted to say that while she’s obviously had a long and illustrious adventuring career, I wasn’t sure what her early childhood or adolescence was like. As I was drawing her in that panel I super fell in love with the idea of her being a gawky teenager. Especially considering her unusually mixed heritage, I can see her with big corrective lenses and one extra large horseshoe (or whatever you’d wear on a cloven hoof) to correct an uneven pigeon toe. Also the other succubi girls, who develop into insanely attractive if somewhat demony teenagers early on, making fun of her for being awkward and/or “too exotic.” In any case, I’m calling that bottom panel totally canon.

I’m actually not sure what early life is like for succubi. They’re not born sexually mature certainly – physically how would that even work? As I think about it, it makes sense that they’d be born normally and that their tantric energy needs are a fraction of what a mature succubi’s are. They start off supplementing from their mothers, (which invites all sorts of questions about family units and succubus/demon culture in general) and as they grow up they can absorb minimal ambient energy from others. While succubus sex ed is comprehensive, they still go through the usual teenage fumblings while they learn to draw energy directly from a partner.

Ok I’ll stop now, I could seriously come up with 50 pages for Demon High right now. Since people have noticed her, I’ll give a shoutout to the cameo by Ava’s Demon, (an enormously well drawn comic) who is resting on top of Dabbler’s head in the last panel.

#MakeComics: This page was one of the hardest pages to write to date in the comic. Besides trying to fit entirely too much dialog on the page, then editing and re-editing it all (I even did some editing right before the page went up.) a large part of it was trying dance around the word “rapey” without actually using it, but I couldn’t quite get Sydney’s point across well enough without it. Plus that’s just the way she talks. I do try and give each character their own voice. Sydney will be going to Archon finishing school here soon, but they won’t be able to iron all her wrinkles out I suspect. It’s telling that Sydney doesn’t even consider the issue of consent in the other direction, (something a lot of people commented on in the previous page) whereas Dabbler goes right there since Succubi are obviously equipped to… well, for them, the demarcation between seduction and… you know, seduction, is broad and blurry. Dabbler is down with all parties being copacetic. There are probably exceptions in her past but she’s behaved while being a guest here on Earth.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.