My girlfriend and I are listening to Linkin Park for some reason* and my gf is like "Oh, I don't like this feeling. What is this? Nostalgia? Thanks, childhood depression lol."
*because the fanfic I'm writing is set in 2006 and we're chatting about the music scene then lol
Come, cringe with me.
To be clear, it was my box of comics, but I certainly haven't thought about them since I put them away over a decade ago.
The "Serenity" comics are the brainchild of one Buzz Dixon, who had written for iconic cartoons and comics in the 80s and 90s, including for GI Joe, Jem and the Holograms, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and My Little Pony.
And then. ??? Christian American "manga"??
Plot: High schooler Serenity Harper moves to a new unnamed town with her single mom. She acts out in a variety of ways that land on a spectrum from "being a goofball" to "being a teenage jerk" to "committing actual crime". The school's “prayer club” finds her very grating and so they masochistically take it upon themselves to reform her.
A series of episodic adventures ensue, which usually involve Serenity reluctantly agreeing to go to the prayer club's events as an excuse to follow her crush around (the goateed Derek) and they usually discuss a surprisingly heavy Topic of the Episode amidst jarringly lighthearted shenanigans.
The comics themselves are only inspired by manga on an extremely superficial level--Buzz says he pitched the series as "Archies with an edge" and that makes a ton of sense. The only real evidence of manga inspiration here is big shiny eyes, blue hair, and, I don't know, imagining teen girls as a target audience.
It definitely feels a bit like Buzz got the idea for this after... maybe watching a couple episodes of Sailor Moon (is "Serenity" supposed to be a reference??) and flipping through a Shojo Beat at a Borders, and thinking, "I could do that." It feels more like it was made to replace manga on a kid's bookshelf than out of love for the genre.
I would like to add... part of why I have so many of these is probably partially because when I was a youth, my hometown had a Christian bookstore, and it carried these. The closest location for actual manga would involve going to a Borders or a Barnes and Noble, the closest of which was a thirty-minute drive. And I didn't drive.
Alright, whatever Buzz's intentions, he seemed to really believe in this concept, as he went from writing for major properties in cartoons and comics and even some video games to... founding a Californian corporation ("Realbuzz Studios", filed 2006, dissolved in 2009). The fact that Buzz went from working with major secular companies to founding a tiny company that worked with Christian publishers left some cracks along the way. (According to Buzz's blog, this project was created in association with Stan Lee, which like... what?!)
Most obviously, Buzz's sense of "how to write mid-oughts teenage slang" was shit. An even bigger problem, the first volume had some dialogue bubbles buried so close to the spine that you can't read it without breaking the spine. Both of these issues were attended to in later volumes, hilariously with Buzz doodling himself apologizing for the slang.
But... you know... it definitely seems like these books could have benefitted from some more oversight. Like imagine doing a Stan Lee project and no one thought to like... fix the dialogue bubbles. What happened there.
Here's the thing about Buzz though. He is not a shit writer. Once he has atoned for the "dawgz", I'm surprised that I did actually have some fun reading it. I've consumed some shitty "evangelical-tract-disguised-as-kid's-entertainment" in my day, and this is certainly that, but there's definitely genuinely effective humor in here.
I think Buzz is actually pretty... medium at writing teenagers. Though he does shoe-horn their struggles into "and that's why you need Jesus", he is aware that it's not totally that simple, and being a teenager is hard even for those who ascribe to the "right" belief system. I think this is best demonstrated by how he contrasts Serenity's thoughts with her nemesis, gold-star-Christian Kimberly, and show how they have more in common than they expect.
Serenity's character development as the books go on is acceptably compelling, and from my standpoint as an atheist who doesn't care if people are Christians or not, I think Buzz makes a case that Serenity's life has improved as a result of having a community and developing a personal spiritual life.
Though, of course, the values of these books are not my values in any way, shape, or form. The books go out of their way to knockdown a strawman feminist, to talk shit about divorce (DO NOT talk shit about divorce or I WILL FIGHT YOU), to revel in purity culture, and to frame drug addiction... just... poorly. And the normal "the only way to be good is to be in our in-group" Christian bullshit.
I also think that the characters who Serenity eventually calls friends can be quite cruel to her. One of the girls, Lori, literally says to her "[We] love [you], yes. Like [you], no." LIKE. WHAT. THAT'S SO FUCKED UP AND CONDESCENDING.
I also find that Buzz has not thoroughly thought through what being a troubled teen is like. Serenity is referred to as an addict and has previously been to “jailed”, but... the full depth of her backstory is vague, and there's no narratives about what she's been through or people from her past who pop up. Honestly, her "addiction" seems... incorrect, and she's never shown wishing she had drugs or pursuing them. My sense of the situation is that maybe she was busted for smoking pot or drinking at a party, rather than... being an actual addict.
Her crush, Derek, is also a recovering alcoholic, and he gets to have a backstory about it, but it doesn't... include a "why" beyond access to alcohol. I find these sorts of narratives very, uh, parent-oriented, where we just glide over the real reasons people might abuse substances that look poorly on the parents (i.e. abuse, neglect, or untreated mental illness) and just blame having access. (Note: I know extremely little about drug or alcohol abuse and why it happens, though I suspect it's something I have in common with Buzz.)
Alright, alright, before I close out.......... we need to talk about Lori.
I find Lori fascinating because, like, she's gay. She's just gay, and she's in these Christian tract-y comics that came out in fucking 2005.
Okay, so, Buzz didn't say that she's gay. BUT HE PUT THE SIGNPOSTS UP. And queer little me, I FOUND THEM.
And I don't know if Buzz is like, in favor of the queers. That is an unknown. But he gives us these tiny little glimpses into the life of this little small town hardcore Christian closeted lesbian, and... it shows a shocking amount of empathy to someone gay in a specifically-Christian publication in 2005.
And that's all I know. I don't have the last couple of volumes of this series, which I accept about myself.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW: Like I said, "Realbuzz Studios" is long gone. Buzz is 70 now and is really active on social media. Buzz's social media content includes being very vocally anti-Trump and he's also talked some shit about evangelicals (‼️) So some character development has definitely happened for him. Welcome to the resistance, Buzz???
Also, I found this AMAZING quote from his blog:
A couple of decades back I created a series of graphic novels for the Christian tween-to-teen female market, the Serenity series.* While the experience taught me never to trust so-called Christian businesses again** I felt proud of what I created and accomplished and enjoyed writing for my cast of seven core characters.
- “Archies with an edge” as I pitched it back in the day.
** I’ve worked with Christian publishers and I’ve worked with pornographers and unlike the Christians, the pornographers paid what they promised to pay when they promised to pay it.
ICONIC. Put that last sentence on a throw pillow.
Unfortunately, the art styles are kind of vague and hazy, which works and is quite beautiful in many places, but in other places it's just hard to discern what's going on. This becomes a problem especially when the line artist changes from book 1 to book 2 and the number of characters explodes (There's five main characters introduced in book 1, and by book 2 most of them grow between two and four other characters in their life.) And it's just like.... "Wait, who is this??" (Not demonstrated in the pictures I include here, lol.)
I have the first four volumes of this one, and allegedly a fifth one exists, but I feel like volume four was pretty conclusive, so I'm not sure why that happened. Maybe they planned another arc that vanished when Realbuzz Studios went under.
I don't have too many thoughts about it. No gays on the horizon. There's a handful of areas that make me go "problematic" but I don't have the will to explain them here, lol. I don't know. It's a fun girl-centered comic that might have held up with time if the art was more consistent/clear and had a tighter cast.
