#9 Shadow of the Hamster

Evil Emperor Nick on Aug. 22, 2007

Amy & me love midnight store raids. We are extremely spoiled because in her homestate there is an awesome 24 hour store called Meijer, where you can get just about anything. In Cleveland however there is only the 24 hour K-Mart which isn't so hot and the 24 hour grocery store. As such we often find ourself running out at 12 AM to purchase a later dinner cook it and clean up all in the middle of the night. Our favorite is Midnight Spaghetti because we make a whole lot and then let it soak in the sauce so a few days later we have awesome left overs. Truthfully though Amy & me have limited time and she has a strong weakness for insant food so often time these raids result in a weeks worth of microwavable instant meals for Amy & Rootbeer for me.

Well there she is Princess Sarah. You should all thank her because Sarah is the character which started this whole series off. I, playing the forum game, requested a picture of what Uma & Rodericke's kid would have looked like. When I saw it I decided there and then I wanted to do a comic with her in it & named her Vampire Princess Sarah on the spot, (This was a small tip of the hat to Vampire Princess Miyu though as Uma & Rodericke's daughter she would have actually been a Vampire Princess in the CTV universe as well a duality I quite enjoyed.) and wrote to Amy asking for permission to use the newly drawn character.

Amy, being Amy, not only gave me permisson but in fact drew me a special Vampire Princess Sarah picture too. One thing she did ask me is what series I was going to use her for to which I wasn't quite sure of at that point. Amy went onto ask if I could find a home for a few other characters from the forum game which she really liked the designs for but didn't have a place in charby for. I said yes.

From there I combined 4 unused characters Amy had (Cyrian, Zosime, Damianos & Ezri you can actually find Damianos wandering around the demon market in Charby as a background character) with 3 characters of my own (Nigel, Skee, Viki plus Vampire Princess Sarah) and from there I wrote up a concept page and a 22 page script for the first issue.

Neither Amy nor I had time to work on the series at the time so the plan was to create a fan comic drawn comic & eventually ask one fan to take over the series. Well the fan comic went forward and despite several attempts with different artist the continueing series never went forward. This went on for years in fact with three different artists. Night School was kept alive by occasional updates to the fan comic which caused me and Amy to discuss the comic now and then but for the most part NS went cold very quickly and stayed that way for several years.

BTW: Thank Arya, Shippo, Scarry & others who kept the fan comic going during that time, and all the artists that had helped with Kojo Academy in its beginnings: Adri,B, and Stephy.