Jeremy Whitley (Navigating With You, Aro & Aces) is back at it again with a double feature. After last year’s success with Aros & Aces and 2024’s Stonewall Book Award winning Navigating With You, he’s back with the double issue of SLAY! and The Girlfriend Survives, now funding on Zoop instead of Kickstarter. More on that later. For now, here’s the pitch.
On one side is SLAY!, the first issue of a fantasy-horror-western by artist Alex Smith, colorist Kelly Fitzpatrick, and letterer Taylor Esposito. Set in a post-apocalyptic frontier, SLAY! begins an epic about coming of age under pressure—where growth is measured in blood, survival is provisional, and heroes are not abstractions but people you might encounter in the woods while wearing their name.
Leilah wants to be a monster hunter as soon as possible. Lacking the reputation or experience to step into that role outright, she borrows one instead, impersonating the infamous Scarred Rider in the hope that proximity to the legend might turn her into something like the real thing.
On the other side is The Girlfriend Survives, a superhero story told from a position usually erased. Illustrated by Luc Nakashoji, and colored by Jamie Noguchi, it follows Delilah Dillon, a barista who falls in love with Billy Bright, a mild-mannered college professor. What Delilah doesn’t know—at least at first—is that Billy is also Brightstar, a powerful and highly visible superhero. What the genre already knows is what tends to happen next.
When Brightstar’s greatest enemy identifies Delilah as a point of leverage, she is pushed toward a familiar narrative outcome: the disposable civilian love interest. But Delilah operates with knowledge the genre rarely grants her. She has survived before. She recognizes patterns. And she refuses to behave as expected. What follows is a reversal that exposes how superhero stories work by showing what happens when someone inside them learns the rules.
Part character drama, part meta-comedy, The Girlfriend Survives doesn’t just avoid the refrigerator—it examines why it was ever there.
Both stories examine genre tropes, rather than simply subvert them. Combine that with queer themes and a female perspective and it’s a quite a draw. Here to talk about both stories more is Jeremy Whitley himself:
E.B. Hutchins: When there’s a trope that someone hates, there is a particular instance of it that makes someone say “I can do it better.” What was the inciting incident for tackling the trope of the hero’s girlfriend?
Jeremy Whitley: Seeing a trope and knowing I can do it better is writing catnip to me. In a sense, that was the foundation on which Princeless was born. Getting excited to read a story, imagining all the cool things that a creator could do, and then seeing an end product that doesn’t make good on that is always going to make me want to do it better.
For me, I will never stop beating the drum of “if the most interesting thing you can do with a character is kill them, you didn’t create a very interesting character” and so often that is exactly the problem with love interest characters in superhero comics. The problem isn’t that the girlfriend character is there, it isn’t even that she dies, it’s that dying is the most interesting thing she can do. What if the girlfriend took control of the narrative? What if she became the protagonist? What if she changed the whole story?
E.B. Hutchins: What drew you to using Zoop as a platform over the traditional Kickstarter process?
Jeremy Whitley: I love making comics because I love to write comics and work with my artist friend to make great and beautiful stories. After fifteen years of doing that, the more of the things that aren’t making the comics that I can get off my plate, the better. Certainly Kickstarter has it’s advantages, like sheer size, but Zoop offered possibilities for working with them that allowed me to put tasks like printing and distribution of rewards in their hands. This means not only do I get to keep writing, but backers ultimately get their rewards faster and I don’t have to figure out how to ship comics without damaging them or fighting with my post office. For me, that’s far and away the best answer.
E.B. Hutchins: Why put both of these stories into one book and not print them separately?
Jeremy Whitley: They’re both first issues of stories that I want to continue, so hopefully they’ll be collected independently at some point, but making them together in a flip book gives me the chance to fund both and provide backers with a unique and limited edition book that we only print as part of this campaign. If we’re really lucky, somebody who’s only initially interested in one title or the other will read both and get excited to know more about the book they might have skipped otherwise. Also, funding and printing one longer book is much cheaper than running to separate campaigns for two different books. Oh and also I just think it’s neat. Who doesn’t like a flip book?
E.B. Hutchins: I noticed a number of the stories you have written center women’s voices and perspectives, would you like to lend any insight on that?
Jeremy Whitley: In real life, most of my heroes have been women. I have a family full of strong women. My wife and my daughters have often been my inspiration for characters in the story. I find that there are an excess of protagonists in the world that look like me. Part of the joy and challenge of writing to me is to try and understand other people, to get in the head of a character that’s not me. I try to tell stories about characters that I don’t already see in the world. A lot of them are based on people who I know and love that I think deserve to be the heroes of these sorts of stories. Especially in the world of westerns, there are so few female badasses, that was something I really wanted to create in the world of Slay!
E.B. Hutchins: The last time we spoke, you talked about wanting to write about your time living in Appalachia, should we expect to see some of that in this double feature?
Jeremy Whitley: You wanna know a secret about Slay!? They town they’re in is fictional, but as the story goes on, they refer to the area they’re in as “The Valley” and it is fully my intention that that is the Shenandoah Valley, which is the Appalachian Virginia.
Along with a few other books I have cooking, I’ve really been trying to set more of my stories in the parts of the world I know and love. I mean, I adore visiting New York, but I think we probably have enough comics set there. Navigating with You, which I wrote for Mad Cave/Maverick takes place in Durham with bits of Atlanta and Wilmington. I think graphic novels give us unique permission to share our love of place if we really embrace that chance and I want to show more of my little corner of the world.
E.B. Hutchins: This one is from a fan to my ears (read: inbox). Will there be any aro or ace representation in either one of these books?
Jeremy Whitley: Absolutely in Slay!. One of our leads is Ace. Not so much in Girlfriend Survives though, as that book is by it’s nature about someone in a romantic relationship. However, there are certainly supporting characters that could be read that way. Not in this first issue though.
E.B. Hutchins: Finally, it seems like 2026 is going to be a stacked year for you in terms of publication. What else can we expect from you this year?
Jeremy Whitley: Not a tone I can talk about unfortunately. I have already had two things come out in the recent conclusion of Marvel’s Strange Tales, which was a ton of fun, and my prose adaptation of the soon to be hit animated film Goat. I think this is actually the first thing I’ve written in prose that will be widely available. Ask me about my novelization of The Eternals some time…
This summer, Jamie Noguchi and I are dropping the third book in our graphic novel trilogy “School for Extraterrestrial Girls” from Mad Cave/Papercutz and we can’t wait for people to read that! Those good, misunderstood, alien girls have been so fun to write and if people haven’t checked them out, there are already two books out in the world. If you loved things like Princeless and Navigating With You, they’re highly recommended.
There’s at least one more book coming this year that hasn’t been announced yet, but I can’t wait to start talking about it! And in the near future you’ll be seeing more of The Dog Knight and my co-written graphic novel with Ben Kahn, The Dashing School for Wayward Princes. I’m gonna keep trying to make new things though and as long as people keep showing up for them, I’ll keep making them!
