Before Spinnerette, there was Krakow. (No, not the city in Poland.)
Krazy Krow's debut comic, Krakow followed the Slice of Life adventures of Canadian roommates Tom and Case and Case's girlfriend Kia, who just happens to be a succubus that Case summoned from hell on a whim one day. It ran from 2000 to 2008.
Occasionally diverted into a subplot entitled "The Demon Sisters", in which the home life of Kia's family is told.
Characters include:
- Case: Canadian college student who got bored and decided to summon a succubus one day.
- Kia: Blue-haired succubus. Case's girlfriend. Works at a bookstore. Dresses... minimally.
- Tom: Canadian college student and Case's roommate. Goes through (very strange) girlfriends like tissue paper.
- Case's parents: Dad works for the US government (for some reason). Mom is a fairly typical MILF.
- Lucretia: Kia's green-haired older sister. Grouchy about her short horns, and not very tolerant of Kia's relationship with a human (something about letting perfectly good food go to waste). Has three eyes.
- Guinness: Kia and Lucretia's little (half) sister; she's half-snake and just entering high school.
- Elise: Guinness's mother, and Kia and Lucretia's stepmother. Lucretia does not like her.
- Kia's Father: Possibly Satan, possibly just a high-level demon lord. Loves his daughters.
Krakow 2.0 is not a sequel, but the first half of the Marilith duology. Likewise, Charliehorse aka Krakow 4.0 doesn't seem to be a direct sequel, though it also deals with succubi and Hell; in this case former victim of a Faustian Bargain Charlie now has to fulfill the main character's Faustian Bargain to claim his soul. Spinnerette is mostly about it's titular superhero, but there are a few arcs centering around Hell and its inhabitants, where fans of Krakow will spot quite a few familiar faces in prominent roles. Whether the other comics are also part of The 'Verse is unknown.
Unfortunately, this and all of KrazyKrow's pre-Spinnerette comics have gone missing from the site.
Krakow provides examples of the following tropes:
- Accidental Pervert: Played with, as Yamaguchi, the co-worker Tom keeps accidentally perving on, is portrayed as an unhinged psycho and her stereotypical Disproportionate Retribution leaves him with serious lasting injuries rather than amusing ones. She eventually gets arrested for attempted murder.
- A-Cup Angst: Played with. Lucretia's breasts are plenty nice, but she's insanely jealous of Kia's much longer devil horns. (It is all but canon that Guinness will eventually have much longer horns than Lucretia as well, which drives Lucretia up the walls.) Reagan instills this in Guinness by comparing her to her sisters.
- Area 51: Case's father worked there for a while.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Tom breaks up with Hanna not because she's a crazy Nazi, but because she's two inches taller than him.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Well, Tom did manage to bag Cute Video Store Girl... after she turned into a fanatic bodybuilder.
- Butt-Monkey: Tom, especially with his multiple oddball girlfriends.
- The Cameo: Gendo, Shinji, and Rei appear in an early strip
. - Canon Welding: Guinness, Tom, and Kia appear in Spinnerette, establishing both comics as happening in the same setting.
- Cute Monster Girl: Guinness. One of the sweetest six-armed demon nagas you'll ever meet.
- Eye Scream: Kia apparently stuck Case in the eye with her horn by accident while having sex. He gets better thanks to a healing potion.
- Good Bad Girl: Kia is the perfect example — though a succubus genetically, she's far happier working in a bookstore. Played with using Reagan, a young vampire and Guinness's only friend at the beginning of high school, who listens to Christian Rock as an act of rebellion against her mother, who is incognito on Earth as a big star in the death metal music world. Except when she's singing sickengly cute kids' music to pay the bills...
- Happily Ever After: Case and Kia tie the knot, and Tom hooks up with Lucretia.
- Humongous Mecha: Tom's job in Japan involves developing these to fend off Kaiju attacks.
- Hyperspace Mallet: Deconstructed for black comedy: when Tom accidentally sees up the skirt of a Japanese coworker, she attacks him with a claw hammer, and he's put in hospital with a cracked skull and has to undergo scans to check for brain damage.
- The Idiot from Osaka: Discussed; the boss points out that Yamaguchi has an Osaka accent, but she's really from Kanto. When asked why, he explains that it's because she's an unrefined Hard-Drinking Party Girl. This makes no sense to Tom at all.
- I Miss Mom: The source of the tensions between Lucretia and Elise. Kia also carries a locket with a picture of her.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Implied; Tom's boss has a long-lost older brother. His masked co-worker "Manager X" tells him that he "might be closer than you know..."
- Mail-Order Bride: Tom accidentally orders one and it turns out to be his crazy Russian professor's sister.
- My Eyes Are Up Here: Inverted, literally. When Guinness flushes Lucretia's contact lens down the toilet and she has to go to work with her glasses on, she's really, really annoyed when a summoner can't keep his eyes on her cleavage because he's staring at her three-lensed glasses.
- Also, in succubi society horns seem to have the same meaning as breasts for humans — leading to phrases such as "I'm down here."
- Also, in succubi society horns seem to have the same meaning as breasts for humans — leading to phrases such as "I'm down here
- Saying Too Much: On the upside, Chapters gets their money one way or another...
- She Is All Grown Up: Doesn't happen in the comic, but Guinness gets a lot of fanart of her as an adult. Guinness herself later appears as an adult in Spinnerette.
- Shout-Out: Before changes, Guinness was explicitly called a Marilith, after the Dungeons & Dragons monster she is patterned after, and Case even made a reference to her as Type V Demon. Mariliths were referred to as Type V Demons in the 1970's. The current version instead references 3rd Edition D&D. In Spinnerette she's once again referred to as a Type V Demon.
- Kia herself is based on a certain eroge about succubi named after cars.
- Square-Cube Law: Early on, Tom's boss claims that they don't build giant robots for this reason.
- Stripperiffic Kia usually wears nothing except her underwear.
- The Unpronounceable: CVSG is the Cute Video Store Girl's real name.
- That Poor Plant: Yamaguchi's tea gets tipped into one, and kills it.
- Third Eye: Lucretia has one in the middle of her forehead.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Hanna is one of them.
- Traveling at the Speed of Plot: Lampshaded by Kia, who is 23 except when she's 1800.
- Tsundere: Yamaguchi-san is an Ax-Crazy parody of the trope.
- Yakuza: Tom pokes fun at one in a public bath. Yamaguchi later signs up when the robot company goes out of business.
