A supposed throwback to past teenage movies that only gives them a bad name

The Daily Dead interviewed Jude Ellison Doyle and Caitlin Yarsky, the writer and artist of a new horror comic titlted Dead Teenagers, and in discussing the premise:

The unfortunate friends in the new five-issue comic book series Dead Teenagers don't have a choice, as they're forced to relive their 1997 prom night in a lethal time loop that kills them thousands of times through increasingly bizarre methods, with everything from a giant lizard to malevolent mannequins resulting in their violent demises before they reboot and live through death all over again with one goal in mind: to break the vicious cycle and figure out why for them, as Bowling for Soup sings, "High school never ends."

Perfect for fans of Happy Death Day and ’90s slashers, Dead Teenagers is a blood-splattered ride down memory lane that is fun, heartfelt, and easily one of my favorite comic books of 2026. [...]

It's interesting to note that Happy Death Day was scripted by the aforementioned Scott Lobdell, in one of at least a handful of forays he did into screenplay writing. And if that's the kind of slop he thinks makes for great entertainment, it just explains what's wrong with Lobdell's MO in the long run. If he hasn't had any involvement with writing the X-Men in a quarter century, it's for the best.

Thank you for taking the time to answer questions for us, Jude and Caitlin, and congratulations on your new comic book series Dead Teenagers! I love time loop stories and really dug the first issue of this series. When did you initially come up with the idea for this mind-bending story?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle: There were a lot of origin points for this story, not least the fact that I’m now a grown-up and have a lot more compassion for teenagers and my own teenage self than I used to, but the truth is, I thought it would be fun to have a high-school reunion for slasher teenagers where they all commiserated about the most embarrassing ways they had died. I wanted to see someone cope with the existential horror of realizing they were only created to be drowned in a toilet by the enraged mutant son of their mean landlady, or something. Then I realized they would have to be alive in order to look back on their deaths, and that sort of slowly folded out into this idea.

What disgust, though obviously a moot point. This is what the entertainment industry's all about? Seriously, if this is all that can be marketed to teens, if that's really what they're doing, something's horribly wrong.

Dead Teenagers swaps the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia to look at the past through a nightmarish lens that pulls no punches. How important was it for you both to tap into the horrors of nostalgia with this story?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle: I think we romanticize “the teen years”—or OUR teen years—as this ideal point in time when you were just grown-up enough to have fun and fall in love, but not yet adult enough to have any real problems. Even people who had really horrible teenage experiences tend to project that image of carefree youth onto other people. I do.

The truth is, though, that nearly anyone who grows up enough has the experience of looking back at their teen years and realizing that things were really screwed-up and hard back then, sometimes in ways they didn’t even have names for at the time. Forms of sexual violence that we protest today were normalized, or slurs and other forms of bigotry that we consider horrible today were part of everyday conversation; just look at those famous John Hughes movies, where every other line is a rape joke or a gay joke.

Being a teenager isn’t any easier or safer than being an adult, even if you don’t always have the vocabulary to name what’s wrong. So that’s what Dead Teenagers is about: the characters are slowly realizing that all the violence they’re growing up with, which they’ve taken almost for granted, isn’t actually normal or okay.

Caitlin Yarsky: Horror may be the most fitting genre to contextualize and express the dark side of growing up. Like Jude said, being a teenager isn’t any safer than being an adult. It’s really often less safe, depending on our environment and the people around us. We don’t have autonomy or control over our lives at that time, and talking about it can be scary because we don’t know who we can trust. I think horror can help convey that feeling of helplessness and fear, while also reminding us that we’re not alone.

Since they bring up the late screenwriter Hughes, who later turned to copycatting his own Home Alone movies to the point of being repellent or plain boring, isn't that interesting they make it sound like all movies normalized jokes about sexual abuse, though I will say that in retrospect, I do think those that do - and Hughes turned out at least one, the Breakfast Club, where it was implied Judd Nelson molested Molly Ringwald under a table - made a disgusting, embarrassingly bad mistake that's only hurt moviedom in hindsight and made things difficult for more recent filmmakers, who're no doubt terrified of dealing with sexual issues, based on what a certain filmmaker who directed the most recent James Bond movie falsely said about Thunderball.

But was virtually all the dialogue in Hughes' teenage-themed films like what this Doyle's claiming? I don't recall what I saw being all that bad. So it sounds like another somebody is just exaggerating if that's what it takes to justify his or her shoddy positions on what constitutes "entertainment". Because despite what they say about violence not being okay, and not something to take for granted, it's clear they still believe what they're setting out to do is "fun". It's not. There's plenty of ways to teach that violence is not the answer to everything and that the whole notion it's wonderful to commit heinous acts is offensive and wrong, morally or otherwise, without making it all out to sound like the story's written for cheap sensationalism. When a writer takes that kind of path, then whatever moral lesson is allegedly in store is contradicted.

As for being a teen not guaranteeing safety, well of course being a teen isn't any better than being an adult, and the past decade's served to teach that the hard way. But that doesn't mean comics writers should be obsessing over the horror genre and not at least providing teens or anybody with some kind of solace and relief from what a sadistic world this can be. Funny how the same people turning out these horror thrillers don't have any issue with savages like Iran's, in example, by sharp contrast. And is there something wrong with a direction that offers teenagers something to feel happy about romantically? If Doyle's saying that's wrong, it's atrocious, and again, an example of how many pseudo-scribes today have no sense of mirth, nor do they wish to be happy.

While working on Dead Teenagers, were you both influenced or inspired by any other time loop or high school stories in film, television, books, comics, or video games (horror or otherwise)?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle: There are a lot of straightforward teen comedies that I looked to for inspiration. I think Clueless and Mean Girls and 10 Things I Hate About You are just effortless, beautiful movies that don’t get the critical respect they deserve because they were made for teenage girls. I also think of Final Destination as a comedy, though that’s probably my problem. I also, strangely, pulled from superhero comics; I loved X-Men comics as a kid, particularly the teen series Generation X, because the characters had that found-family dynamic, and the inter-scene banter was often just as interesting as whatever they were fighting.

Caitlin Yarsky: All of the media Jude mentioned was inspiration for me too. I was also a big Buffy fan and read a ton of Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Stephen King books. There were movies like She’s All That and shows like Clarissa Explains It All that will always live in my head rent-free.

Caitlin, you created a great variant cover for Dead Teenagers #1 that pays homage to the iconic ’90s film Pretty Woman, and I understand that you’ll be honoring other ’90s films with a variant cover for each upcoming issue. Can you give us a tease of which ’90s films you’ll be celebrating on future covers?

Caitlin Yarsky: Haha I’m not sure how many I can spoil, but I’ll say that Clueless is in the mix!

I find it very unappealing when somebody draws inspiration from a scribe as unendurable as King's turned out to be. I may have watched 2 or 3 movies based on his novels in the past, but that's decidedly it, and I'd rather have nothing to do with him today. Interesting though that the writer actually loved X-Men, right down to the spinoff Lobdell wrote back in the day that may be considered one of the few better items in his resume. Were his forays into the horror genre what influenced this comic? Whatever, I don't see how something as revolting as what they describe could pay tribute to comedies and dramas that were far from horror thrillers in their time. What is clear is that the influence of horror continues to be chillingly dominant.

Ultimately, what do you hope readers take away from this comic book series?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle: Fun, hopefully. It’s a dark time and we could all use a break. But also, I want people who don’t normally see themselves or their teenage struggles portrayed in the media to feel seen, and I want to give us all a little encouragement to reckon with our formative traumas and leave our safe zones and grow up.

Caitlin Yarsky: Entertainment for sure, but as Jude said, there are deep themes in here that I hope resonate with people who may feel unrepresented or unheard. I hope people find it exciting and fun, but also meaningful and something they would want to revisit.

If it's so dark today, why do they want to heap more upon us? The mere mention of "fun", as noted before, only contradicts any supposedly positive messages they're trying to convey. Seriously, this is repulsive. And what does she mean by "unrepresented and unheard"? The following near the end may give a clue:

With Dead Teenagers #1 being released in comic book shops on March 18th, what other projects do you both have coming up that you can tease for our readers, and where can they go online to keep up to date on your work?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle: I’ve written a whole bunch of things in the last year—aside from Dead Teenagers, there’s Be Not Afraid, which just wrapped up at BOOM!, and DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, which is my obligatory non-fiction book about my transition. [...]

What?!? Does this mean the writer's a woman who took the transsexual route too?!? Boy, there sure is something mind-bogglingly wrong with this whole picture then. So the writer/artist claim this horror tale is meant to be "fun", despite jarring violence being anything but, and then they expect supposedly positive messages to work? Sigh. One must wonder if there's certain left-wing "feminists" who got so disillusioned with the belief system, yet actually thought self-hatred of their sex was any more acceptable, to the point they desecrated themselves in the past decade. For all we know, that could be the fallout from feminism, that it failed to make women proud to be what they are, and only led to worse in the long run.

Anyway, it's shameful how there's quite a few scribes in comicdom who're obsessing with the horror genre, and telling these specialty sites in turn exactly what they'd love to hear. I don't think John Hughes movies of the past 4 decades are perfect, but emphasizing the horror genre does not an improvement make. What the twosome who put out this loathsome comic are doing is despicable.