CAST
Chelseasimone Alethia Nausicaä Gish
Age: 9
First Appearance: “Horror from Beyond the Drywall” page 01
A highly intelligent, precocious spitfire of seemingly unbridled energy and curiosity, Chelsea Gish certainly is quite a “character”.
Chelsea is gregarious and outgoing, and is often the instigator of her and her sister’s adventures (when the Universe itself isn’t thrusting inadvertent adventures upon them). She’s a resourceful and quick thinker, able to think on her feet and expeditiously come up with solutions to problems — solutions which are sometimes rather unorthodox.
Chelsea has a sharp wit and a smidge of overconfidence about her, which coupled with her big mouth can sometimes get her into trouble.
Chelsea prides herself on her grades in school, and sees anything less than a B+ as a crushing defeat (hey, straight A’s are fine and dandy, but she figures gotta have SOME wiggle room for an off day).
A self-professed philonoist, Chels’ harbours an at times almost fanatical eagerness to engage in exploring and studying the world around her (and also a myriad of things that don’t happen to exist within her general propinquity).
Much of Chelsea’s desire to learn came from an innate base which was nurtured by Alain and Clover, who taught both her and Millie to read at a younger-than-average age, which therefore equipped them with a good head start in acquiring knowledge and entertainment via the written word. This is Max and Tom’s fairly plausible excuse for Chelsea’s nine-year-old mind describing stuff via an at times ridiculously grandiloquent and playfully archaic idiosyncratic form of scattershot nattering.
Hoooo-boy. When she gets going with that stuff it can be murder to try and pack it all into comic-dialogue balloons I can assure you. I’d rather break a gobstopper into 16ths with a broken chisel than transliterate her dialogue when she really gets into one of her spiels. I mean what is this, Chelsea? Shakespeare?
She also reeeeally dislikes being called “Chelseasimone”, much preferring plain old “Chelsea”. This is due to two main factors; the first being that she just plain doesn’t like how “Simone” sounds, and the second being that her parents only refer to her by her full first name when she’s in trouble.
Milisindra Gabriella Gish
Age: 5
First Appearance: “Horror from Beyond the Drywall” page 01
Wee Millie Gish is a caring, sensitive, thoughtful and generally cheerful little miss.
More cautious and reserved than her sister, Millie is the voice of reason to Chelsea’s more outlandish schemes and ideas. Sometimes. At other times she’s quite happy to go along with the somewhat unorthodox ideas and plans Chelsea tends to cook up. If Chelsea is the instigator then Millie is often the accelerator, in her own quiet way.
Millie adores her big sister, and has a huge amount of admiration for her, tending to view Chelsea as being the leader of their little two-girl gang. Give Millie a couple more years and I bet that attitude will change.
Millie often takes her cues from Chelsea, but is more than capable of expressing her own opinions, sticking up for herself when she disagrees with her over-exuberant sister. Being only five years of age, Millie sometimes ends up getting confused over word-meanings and expressions, and she tends to take people and their intentions at face value.
She considers Chelsea to be her best friend. Aww, isn’t that sweet?
In contrast to Chelsea’s freewheeling ebullient grandiosity, Millie is a person of quiet eccentricity. She’s still of an age where her mind is very malleable; she has yet to fully define a solid set of perceptual divisions between what is “real” and what is “not real”. As a result she is prone to carrying her imagination off into realms of pure fanciful whimsy from time to time. For example, it’s not unusual to encounter her engaged in deep conversation with her silent pointy-eared plush-companion, the mysterious Mr. Squiggles.
Millie, like her father, is deeply fascinated with insects and animated cartoons. She also has a large sweet-tooth, being partial to all manner of sickeningly sweet goop that is somehow still allowed to be called “food”; the type of “food” which lines the sides of the slow road to total dental collapse. So it’s lucky for her that she’s still on her baby-teeth and that her mother is pretty militant about regulating her sugar intake.
Clover Lunamarie Gish
Age: 38
First Appearance: “Swimming Pool from Beyond the Stars” page 01
Musician, visual artist, composer, sonic seductress, baker of cupcakes and giver of maternal and spousal love in infinite abundance.
Clover was the guitarist, lead vocalist, lyricist and primary songwriter/creative-force behind the infamous and highly respected metal/industrial/rock band Miss Machine, a band responsible for two of the most innovative albums in the metal/industrial/rock genres, Invidia and Drizzlegirls.
Since retiring Miss Machine Clover has been busy raising her kids and tinkering away on various musical projects in her basement home-studio. During this time she has also discovered a passion for composing film scores, and has scored the latter portion of her husband’s filmography.
In addition to her musical proclivities she enjoys painting and drawing, and often paints twisted beasties and characters featured in various myths and folklore from around the globe. She’s an avid fan of getting up really early in the morning to go jogging. Her attempts at getting her family up at the crack of dawn to join her on her cardio sojourns are always met with much resistance. She isn’t about to give up on that plan yet though.
Clover is a slim, short woman, five feet tall and around 85 pounds in weight; her physical stature is in sharp contrast to the harrowing ferocity of her music and her vocal capabilities. She’s a strong and independent person, possessing a sophistication and knowledge gained from her experiences travelling the world with her band. A former young firebrand who has matured into a worldly-wise woman possessed of the insights gained from living a life of no-holds-barred extremes — a life which she was determined to live on her own terms ever since she helped found Miss Machine in her late teens as she began her journey into parleying her passion, ambition and drive into a successful creative career.
Out of all the Gish family members, she’s probably the most quirky and eccentric. She’s certainly the most wilful.
Oddly enough, Clover’s maiden name is also Gish, but she and Alain are not genetically related. And thank goodness for that, because that would be weeeiiird.
Clover has a natural ability to only sleep a few hours a night with no ill-effects, much like one of the poor buggers who constitute this comic’s creative duo. The other does too, but with a wealth of ill-effects (someone tell Tom to go to SLEEP).
Having spent over half of her adult life on the road with no fixed abode Clover has turned into a bit of a hoarder since moving into the Gish’s current house. Mainly a hoarder of all manner of musical and audio-production-related gear and instruments, but also of a large number of curios that she picked up during her globe-hopping travels with her band.
She’s a pretty cool mom, that Clover.
Alain Damian Gish
Age: 42
First Appearance: “Swimming Pool from Beyond the Stars” page 01
Visionary filmmaker, cinéaste, creative connoisseur. “Local eccentric”. Devoted father and husband, scholar of the esoteric, dealer in the macabre, avid aficionado of life’s amaranthine abundance of absurdities. No great shakes at baking cupcakes.
Alain as a filmmaker works primarily in the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres. He describes his films as being “human stories set against a backdrop of the eldritch and fantastical”. A sort of fantasy-horror mish-mash.
Alain is pretty much a self-made man in many ways. He never went to film school, instead developed his skills shooting music videos for various Australasian bands.
He still enjoys directing/editing music videos for bands to this day, here and there as his schedule allows.
He has a vast knowledge of film and global film history, and possesses a staggeringly large collection of films, which he can often be found watching in his spare time down in the small home-cinema he managed to have built down in the basement area that hadn’t been devoured by Clover’s home studio. Alain is a film nerd through and through, and although he is largely self-taught he has a vast knowledge and command of film-making techniques and related terminology.
His roles in his films include directing, writing and editing. He tried acting in a film once via a short cameo in one of his films, but quickly decided that his “acting” was something that nobody ought to have to be subjected to.
Unlike the rest of the Gish family, Alain is not a native-born American, as he was born and raised in Aotearoa (aka New Zealand). The fact that there is a large enough percentage of people who don’t know that Aotearoa even exists, let alone where it is (do you? Huh? Huhh??) is a source of mild to middling exasperation for him.
Although a well-read and worldly-wise fellow of keen intellect and remarkable acumen in regards to his chosen profession, Alain is a quintessential “dreamer with his head in the clouds”, often concentrating his mental energies on film and story-related concerns, and as a result he doesn’t tend do so well in dealing with the quotidian clutter and various niggling details that constitute everyday life, giving him a somewhat absent-minded air at times.
Alain is the sort of person for whom day-to-day life is often just an exasperating morass of weirdness that he’d prefer not to have confuddling up his headspace when he’s on a roll with idea-generation and creative concerns.
He possesses a very deep vein of imagination-inspiration (something which he has genetically passed onto Chelsea), though his imagination tends to focus itself both far more efficiently and in different areas than Chelsea’s more erratic and scattershot fanciful impulses.
Alain tends to view those devoid of a strong imaginative streak as being rather difficult to relate to.
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