Comedy Chapter 1 Author's Note!
March 16th 2026
Here is my author’s note for Chapter 1 of Comedy. I don’t know exactly when you’ll be reading this, but as I write it today, it’s February 12, 2026.
To start, I grew up in Fremont, California. I don’t want the novel to be set exactly in Fremont because I wanted to include various different elements from different towns I’ve lived in, and I didn’t want to restrict myself to real-life landmarks. So, I came up with “Evermont,” a town inspired by Fremont, but the geography isn’t exactly accurate. That said, the gentrification in Evermind reflects what’s I personally think happened in Fremont. As an example, my childhood home if it were going to get sold on the market, would go for about $1.5 million, which I don’t think it’s really worth, considering it’s only around 1,000 square feet and was built in 1958. My parents paid nowhere near that when they bought it back in the day, believe it was about $300,000.
The mall, Summit Valley Mall, is directly based on NewPark Mall, which was my childhood mall. Its story is similar: built in the ’80s, and a beloved really nice local mall, but over time it degraded quite a bit — which I think is true for most malls unless they have something special going for them.
Back to the plot: Chapter 1 is based on a childhood book I made in 2011, also titled Comedy. In that story, the two main characters, Jesse and Joseph, started the comic by doing a comedy act on stage and things went awry. It wasn’t meant to be a deep comic, but my friends asked if they could draw in my notebook, and they started adding a lot of action scenes with guns and shit — and it just grew from there. So, I wanted Chapter 1 of this novel to be a direct tribute to that, with an act taking place at a talent show. The line Derek says, “You suck, I have a taser,” is directly lifted from that original story.
The writing for this version of Comedy began around April 2025. Originally, I wanted it to be a webcomic with different issues released over time, but I couldn’t find an artist who could capture the exact style I wanted. Also, webcomics are expensive and time-intensive, and I don’t have the budget to produce it that way. If I would've continued doing the webcomic route, the story would have taken years to finish.
Many aspects of the book have remained the same since the beginning. The main characters were always Jett, Corey, Chase, and Shiloh. But there were some major differences — originally, there was a whole subplot about Jet’s pet rats who could secretly talk and did Pinky and the Brain–type schemes. That part was phased out as Comedy shifted from a webcomic to a novel.
Next time, I’ll talk about Chapter 2, where the group finds their name.