Boing Boing Exclusive Interview With Zodiac Starforce Creators

Anyone who grew up around Sailor Moon is probably familiar with the concept of magical girls: a team of young women—often in junior high or high school—who transform into superheroines with fantastical powers to fight evil. But what happens to a magical girl team after they defeat the bad guy, go back to their normal lives in high school, and start growing apart?

That's the premise of Zodiac Starforce, an upcoming comic created by artist Paulina Ganucheau and writer Kevin Panetta. All of the heroines are 16-year-old girls, each with her own astrological codename: Emma (Gemini), Savanna (Pisces), Kim (Taurus) and Molly (Aries). Rather than telling the story about how the team got together or introducing the great evil they have to defeat, Zodiac Starforce begins after they've already won.

It's been two years since the girls received their power from an goddess named Astra and destroyed the villain Cimmeria; the team has since disbanded, and like a lot of friends do over the course of high school, they're starting to find themselves drawn to different interests and heading in different directions.

"All my best friends now are people I've met in the last 5 years. And I think it's that way for a lot of people, so it's great to show it in a story you usually don't see it in," says Ganucheau. "It's based in a more real reality than, say, the 'friends forever' mentality that is all of Sailor Moon.

Although they cite inspirations like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Legend of Korra and Sailor Moon, Ganucheau and Panetta say Zodiac Starforce started out as something very different: a science fiction tale called Cadets about young adults training to fight aliens at a military school in space. The duo originally imagined Zodiac Starforce as the anime series that the characters in Cadets liked to watch, and while Cadets never ultimately went anywhere, the idea for the magical girl metashow endured.

We learn about the girls not through traditional origin stories, but through how they react when a monster appears for the first time in years. Kim can't wait to get Zodiac Starforce back together—and rekindle their close-knit friendship—while Molly is convinced that she's just clinging desperately to the past. Emma, the team's former leader, has her own uncertainties about returning to a life of astral battles, especially since she's still reeling from the death of her mother.

In the grand tradition of so many high school stories, everything comes to a head at a house party. "It's the most high school thing in the world to me," says Panetta. "So much happens when you get a bunch of people together at a house. It seemed like the perfect location for our first issue. And of course your mortal enemy is always going to be at the party too.