The Daily Cross Hatch talks to La Perdida author Jessica Abel about her latest book for First Second, the “vampires meets Clerks” comedy Life Sucks.
Life Sucks is something of a marked change from pretty much everything you’ve done before. How did the project come about?
I started working on Life Sucks a while ago—maybe four or five years ago. Gabe [Soria], Matt [Madden], and I were out having fun one night, and Gabe came up with this idea of a slacker vampire. We were joking about it for a long time—we thought it was funny, and Matt wrote down the basic outline on his Palm Pilot.
A couple of months later, we hadn’t done anything with it, but I got in touch with Gabe, and asked if he wanted to do it together. Part of the idea at the time was that cowriting sounded like fun and a good way to regulate—have two people both encouraging each other and so on, but it didn’t turn out that way, at all [laughs]. I love Gabe, but it didn’t end up being a lot of fun.
There were moments that were fun, but it turns out that it’s a really hard way to work. My initial idea was probably not the wisest, but it turns out that the book was probably better off with the collaboration. We each brought our own voice to it and made something that neither one of us probably could have done on our own.
