Cinderelliot

Cinderelliot is the first work to be published offline by Fauna Crawford, produced over the summer of 2009, containing numerous characters whom later appeared in Westbury Detectives. The story is a modernized, gender-swapped version of Cinderella, featuring a truck stop motel janitor trying to win the heart of a mob boss's daughter, and numerous cringe-inducing name puns.

Summary
Just outside Montreal, Elliot Baker works cleaning rooms at a dingy off-ramp motel, struggling to write a book and avoid his loathing boss "Stepmama". At the same time, up-and-coming model Charmy King is offered a job, which her mob leader father attempts to keep her from out of concern for her security. When Stepmama is invited to an exclusive mob-hosted party, Elliot wants to go as well, and after accidentally passing out from cleaning fumes, he's saved by his temporary Fairy Godfather. After slipping into the party and Elliot and Charmy getting to meet, Stepmama begins to plan to kidnap King and his daughter as revenge for an unpaid debt...

Characters

 * Elliot Baker - A cynical 22-year-old room cleaner writing a sci-fi novel on the side. He's frustrated with being compared to his far more successful doctor brother, while being harassed by his boss. He appears in Westbury Detectives as Calvin Baker.
 * Fairy Godfather - A flamboyantly gay guardian fairy who answers Elliot's wishes, although winds up more focused on flirting with Elliot's friend George. He's slightly airheaded and carefree, which comes off as irritating to Elliot initially. He appears in Westbury Detectives as Lucas O'Hare.
 * Charmine "Charmy" King - The 24-year-old daughter of a mob boss, trying to break out as a model and away from her overprotective father. While she comes off as reserved and pure-hearted, she is profoundly-skilled in close combat. She appears in Westbury Detectives as Julia Emmett.
 * Eric King - The leader of the number one criminal syndicate in Montreal, an extremely wealthy womanizer, albeit worried his daughter will fall prey to a younger man like he used to be. He appears in Westbury Detectives as Clay Emmett.
 * Alexis "Stepmama" Hayes - Elliot's boss, a bitter French-Canadian motel owner constantly backed by her Scene Girl nieces as protection. Her relationship with King is initially unclear, although it's evident she despises him. It is implied she is a former hustler.
 * George Hawkins & Mina Wilson - Elliot's best friends and co-workers, the bubbly and hyper Mina working reception and the awkward, anxious George, another cleaner. The two were meant to symbolize the Cinderella birds and mice respectively. George appears in Westbury Detectives in Pinhead Miyamoto's gang, as the man Mara punches in the face in Fragments of Manhattan, and as the lackey arrested at the beginning of Ice Heart.
 * Pinhead - King's specially-selected successor, a clumsy, quiet young man with thick bangs over his eyes, full name never disclosed. Resembles a 24-year-old Pinhead Miyamoto.

Production
The concept for an altered version of Cinderella was first formed in December 2008, but preliminary character designs were made much later in February 2009. Charmy and King were originally going to be redheaded Italians, but Fauna changed them to be African-American to make the work more diverse, finding them more "interesting" when non-Caucasian.

Prior to the start of work on Cinderelliot, Fauna was graduating from 10th grade, unable to find a job and turned down for a spot in a school trip to Japan. She begun work on a comic in order to fill the summer, working on at least one page every weekday. When either issue was completed, up to five copies were manually printed out at home via a computer printer and distributed at 8th Street Books & Comics, which offered a local comic selling program at the time. Each 2009 issue retailed for $2 each, and only a maximum of twenty copies of either issue were ever printed due to budget restraints.

There was no laid-out script for the series. Fauna would lay out a list of important details and things she wanted to happen, and make each page according to how much would fit on the page.

Reception
Originally marketed primarily at 15-20 year olds, reception was highly positive, prompting Fauna to leave a free issue in her high school's library, which circulated until it was either confiscated or stolen.

There were complaints from some older readers over the Fairy Godfather's behaviour towards George, which Fauna initially hadn't seen as over the edge, having intended it as a parody of the Japanese cartoon character Lupin III's "flirting" style with cohort and would-be lover Fujiko Mine. After being told it resembled a homosexual stereotype, Fauna prematurely discontinued the series, embarrassed.

Remake
A reprint of the series was planned for mid-2010 as a first anniversary celebration, but Fauna repeatedly postponed it out of uneasiness of the potentially offensive content. After rejecting an idea for a lengthy bonus story at the end, she remade panels, replaced or added pages, and re-scanned touched-up pages in order to "repair" the story. One hundred copies were professionally printed, and just over half were sold. Fauna occasionally offers her Tumblr followers a free copy.

New Pages
The final half-page was expanded to two pages, which elaborated more on where George and Mina were, Elliot's book, and the Fairy Godfather's next assignment. The page where Elliot makes the Fairy Godfather cry was replaced in order to portray Elliot as being more sympathetic, as well as to cover up a gratuitous drawing error. Right after issue two would have started, a page was included to show Mina running afoul of Stepmama the day after the party. A page was added early on to give more of an introspective on Elliot and the Fairy Godfather's respective inferiority complexes towards their siblings.

Altered Content
Minor editing ranged from repairing textual errors (i.e. grammar errors, and "honky" to "cracker") to touching up previously uncoloured parts of Charmy and King (i.e. Charmy's whole arm at one point), but most of the edits included whole panels during scenes were the Fairy Godfather first interacted with George. A sequence where George is tackled to the ground is altered to show Fairy Godfather finding him adorable, attempting to hug him and knocking themselves over; cartoony hearts are added over the two later in this sequence. Finally, a scene where the Fairy Godfather was forcing himself on George in the car, including George giving in out of terror, was edited to be a much less disturbing moment where George is smoothly seduced.

Allusions

 * Fauna was heavily inspired by Ralph Bakshi's 1973 film Heavy Traffic, inspiring its crass and sometimes dark tone, and the lead romance between a Caucasian man and an African-American woman.
 * "Almost" by the Blues Brothers is referenced in one scene, throwing back to Cain/Elliot's origins of being inspired by John Belushi.
 * Elliot gives "Calvin" as a fake name, absolutely intended to be a reference to his later mob member incarnation in Westbury Detectives, which began production almost two years later.
 * The scene where the Fairy Godfather appears on Elliot's TV was originally intended as an advance look at Lux, a rude super robot boy comic Fauna was planning at the time. There, the Fairy Godfather played a mob leader whom was a darker, murderous, bisexual version of himself.
 * Pinhead Miyamoto's design here was set to be his official Westbury Detectives design, up until late 2010. He appears with a slightly similar hairstyle in The Chinatown Killer.
 * An early version of Carrie Giuliante appears in King's flashback as the woman who takes Stepmama's nieces to the movies.
 * An after-comic is added in the 2010 edition, which includes Fauna's liner notes in comic form, as well as a one-panel parody of the manga series Kaiji. This page references Fauna's former classmate, Katelyn McDonald, who swayed Fauna into making the Fairy Godfather an attempted rapist in the 2009 version. The reverse of this page promised a handful of comic titles to debut in 2011, of which the only one to actually do so was Westbury Detectives.