Entertainment Weekly’s website has the complete back-up tale from the upcoming first issue of Oni’s Tek Jansen series. They also interviewed the story’s writer, Jim Massey, who talks about the back-up story, Horn Like Me!, which features aliens that sport, naturally, horns:

I was just looking for some physical characteristic that I could apply to this alien race that had no intrinsic worth to the value of a person, but was just an excuse for bias and prejudice. Originally, it was gonna be Green Like Me!, and it was going to be like green skin versus blue skin. And my editor and I talked about it, and we felt like it was a little too on the nose. So we took it away from skin color, and just made it the horns. And honestly, the inspiration for the story itself is Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches book, where they’ve got the Star-Belly Sneetches and the Plain-Belly Sneetches and they hate other because one has stars and the other doesn’t. One of the shops in the background of a scene [in Horn Like Me!] is even named Sneetch & Sons. The title Horn Like Me! is lifted from the famous Black Like Me book, where the white journalist [John Howard Griffin] goes undercover in the South as a black man and gets a firsthand experience of racism. I wanted to echo that in the title, just to point out the ridiculousness of it all.

They also spoke to John Layman about what it’s like working with Stephen Colbert:

If that sounds like a Colbert-ian zinger, it should: Colbert went through the script line by line. Says Layman, ”We’d get notes, like ‘Oh, you know, I was rereading this on my porch Saturday…’ I’ve had editors who don’t pay that close attention. There’s quite a bit of back-and-forth because I think Stephen Colbert is a geek.”

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