Reading · The Scorpio Room

Happy New Year!

First things first, here’s an online pre-order link for a bunch of the amazing covers for SIRENS: LOVE HURTS #1 and #2, my upcoming book from DC COMICS BLACK LABEL with thee legendary Babs Tarr. If you’re still on the fence, read on - and I’ll post it that pre-order link again at the end for when you’re convinced. 🫶

It hit me that in all the Marian Heretic fanfare, I hadn’t made a dedicated post to talk about SIRENS: LOVE HURTS, and we’re already something like thirteen days from final order cutoff. It’s crazy to feel like it’s coming up so quickly, because this book didn’t come together quickly: we’ve been working on it since 2022!

That’s afforded Babs, me, and our editors Andrea and Ash so much time, glorious time. Working at the speed of a monthly comic, you don’t get a lot of chances to iterate. Ideas hit the page and then the shelves about as soon as you can think of them - even getting ahead requires some cram time, so you never really get the time to stretch out and try things over and over again.

This feels like the opposite - for so long Babs and I have been developing and spending time with these versions of these girls. We know them so well, and we can’t wait to introduce them to you. So…how did they come to be?

Well first of all, the DC Black Label experience, for me, has involved a lot of fun customization. I’ve talked before about ‘sliders’ - the gamer-brain word I use to describe the options I’m afforded at the beginning of a project. I want to know everything I can change: what is fixed about the project, pre-determined during the approval process by the Powers that Be, and what can I change? How much space do I have, what characters can I use, what part of the market am I trying to hit?

In our case, what we got approved (with the help of the legendary editor Jess Chen, who has now departed comics for the world of amazing card games) was simply the loose concept - “Sirens as Sex and the City,” a comic book for an adult audience focusing on love, relationships, and friendship - but one with a distinctly Gotham City edge. It would be drawn by Babs and written by me, and 128 pages. The rest was up to us: don’t threaten me with a good time. It’s both wonderful and daunting - what do you do with a dream artist and 128 pages?

RuPaul's Drag Race: Liberating or just the same old s***!? – cmns324: Media, Sport, and Popular Culture

…no pressure.

So how to not fuck it up?

I always try and capture my raw ideas at this point. Before all else, the Sirens are friends. Female friendship stories have always been important to me, and I know I’m not alone in that. I grew up on The Babysitters’ Club and Sailor Moon, stories for and by women that were full of such different and real groups of girls.

In comparison, a lot of the media I enjoyed came up really short. It felt crazy to go from these groups of different girls that were like the ones I myself knew to the other stories I liked - where there was often just one token girl. Token characters often come off false for obvious reasons: when they have to be every personality trait at once (emotional! flirty! bossy! aloof! nurturing! rebellious!) to fill any role a Token Person might fill, they came away feeling false.

In high school I got really into anime and manga, with books like NANA and MARS and Paradise Kiss showing me that sweet spot between the adult-audience media I was starting to enjoy, and the friendship-based content I’d enjoyed as a kid. I came of age (was about 16-24) during the era of Sex and the City, and while it’s not without many dated flaws and has become something of a dead horse limping these days, I maintain that it was truly transformative in its time, no less than The Sopranos. As a young woman who didn’t even realize I was learning episodic storycraft, I was learning it from Sex and the City. These women were nothing like me, and I’ve never even found their lives particularly personally aspirational1, but I was sucked in by the honest conversation between adult women who weren’t set up to hate each other, they were spending their brunches in a sort of hallowed space where they could be fully honest with one another in a way they could be nowhere else in their lives. The Seinfeld diner but with no boys, so they could talk about sex and being mad at their boyfriends and feeling shitty. I loved that.

Sirens: Love Hurts owes a big debt to Babs’ and I’s favorite 2000s manga, as mentioned, but I can’t go without mentioning one of the books that inspired me most: Tokyo Tarereba Girls. I could go on and on about this one, but I’ll start with what hooked me - it’s about three thirty year old single friends who meet up at an izakaya for snacks and romantic laments. Thirty year old single women don’t get a lot of manga protag time, knowwhatImean? If you’re champing at the bit for Sirens: Love Hurts #1 and you want something to read in the meantime, read Tokyo Tarereba Girls.

I had a gut feeling from the start that I wanted a nice, balanced four characters instead of the Sirens’ standard three. Not only did that seem more balanced narratively, it gave us an opportunity for some interesting dynamic to play out. Babs and I had already gotten some space to tell a little story about the origin of the Sirens name and party setup in Harley Quinn: Black, White and Redder. We know so much about the Sirens already, it didn’t feel like we could get a ton of tension out of threatening that dynamic, nor did I think fans wanted to see that. I wanted us to enjoy the Sirens at their height, together, when something throws them into disarray. If I wanted that standard four, that final tentpole, I needed one more Gotham girl. Of which there are many, but only one came to mind for me: Miss Dinah Lance herself, the Black Canary.

Dinah has enough of a hero pedigree to be a real threat to the Sirens’ criminal ways, while still being street smart and a Gothamite to the core. She’s not afraid to get her hands dirty to do the right thing - and that’s what makes her a fascinating fourth member of our Sirens crew.

(Additional shoutouts inspiring Dinah showing up here are the super fun best friend vibes she has in Black Canary/Zatanna: Bloodspell, Jurnee Smollet’s portrayal in Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey, and that wonderful DCYou era where Babs’ Batgirl and Annie Wu’s Black Canary were lighting shelves aflame at the same time.)

Once I had Dinah in mind, the rest of the details fell into place. With four Sirens, we could do four 32-page issues. Each issue isn’t about one Siren - they all appear in each one - but there’s a harmony to it furthered by the book’s structure: each issue is one season of the year. Not just any old year, but the year that kicks off with Dinah Lance’s engagement to Oliver Queen and ends with their star-studded wedding day. A year that kicks off Selina Kyle’s legendary player era - Bruce Wayne or Batman? -and a year that sets roommates Pamela Isley and Harleen Quinzel on edge and brings their friendship to the brink of….something else.

And there’s one final, frightening thing that will bring these women together - a serial killer stalking Gotham’s women, one only the Sirens can bring down. It is, after all, Gotham City. This isn’t a Metropolis book - there are killers and monsters and madmen in the shadows, and our Sirens are the last line of defense. What we end up with is a perfect DC mashup - Gotham City Sirens meets The Long Halloween.

One of the most fun parts of this whole process has been style. If you know Babs’ work you know it’s style on style and I happily leaned into that in my scripting. In each issue there are costume changes and moments I wrote in just for Babs to flex her beautiful design chops. We can’t help but work with cosplayers in mind! This is a hot girl book for hot girls2 and we want to empower people to play dress up.

Part of that was thinking of the girls as people with wardrobes rather than superheroes with costumes. So often in superhero comics the focus is the spandex and their day-to-day clothes are kind of an afterthought - not so here. While Babs was working on her prior projects, I had some time to plot and plan, so I did what I usually do when I want to curate visuals for a collaborator - I turned to Pinterest.

The boards seen within this post represent some of the earliest visual work on the book, absolute dust from which Babs Tarr has spun some of the most beautiful, funny, and heartfelt comics pages I have ever read.

If you’ve pre-ordered Sirens: Love Hurts #1 already, THANK YOU! Drop a comment below letting me know where, I love to know where you all get my books. If you haven’t, you’re gonna want to before January 19th! There are some incredible covers that you haven’t seen yet, as well as some absolutely showstopping interiors brought to you by Babs and an incredible art team including Miquel Muerto’s colors and Becca Carey’s jaw dropping letters, she’s amazing, y’all.

part one of Tula Lotay’s four connecting variants featuring Ivy (Miss Isley if ya nasty)

One last thing to leave you with this week - what’s a Siren without her song? Over the year or so I’ve been working with these girls I’ve listened to a lot of music. I finally curated it down to four playlists to share with Babs, and now I’ll share them with you:

Pre-order link for #1 and #2!

Stay weird, talk soon -

-TH 1.6.2026 23:07