Despite all the misery that’ll come with the end of the world, there’s bound to be some people still having a good time—and they will probably be playing guitars.

At least that’s the thinking behind Apocalipstix, a new graphic novel from Oni Press that debuted at the recent Comic Con International: San Diego. Drawing on everything from girl-bands like Archie Comics’ Josie & the Pussycats and Sleater-Kinney to films like Escape from New York and comics like Tank Girl, artist Cameron Stewart and writer Ray Fawkes tell the tale of the Apocalipstix—an all-girl band who decide, come hell or high water, they’re not going to let Armageddon stop their cross-country tour! And since hell’s already come, all they have to worry about is high water! Well, there are also road warriors, giant insects, running out of gas and other obstacles—but you get the picture.

Apocalipstix got its start in 2003 when Stewart—fresh off an acclaimed run on DC Comics’ Catwoman series—approached his fellow Toronto buddy Fawkes—writer of of horror comics series Spookshow and Mnemovore—with a list of elements he wanted to draw. Fawkes’ job was to come up with a story for all of them.

“I needed something to jumpstart my creativity and nothing helps do that more than working on something of your own creation,” Stewart said. “One of my favorite things to draw is cute girls, so that was a given. I also love music and wanted to do something involving that,” Stewart explained. He was also looking to do something different from his work on mainstream comics series like Batman. “After drawing endless pages of buildings in Gotham City, I wanted to draw as little architecture as possible. As a joke I noted that the opposite of a sprawling city would be an empty desert. I came up with the image of an all-girl rock band driving in a tour bus through the desert, and started thinking about how they got there. From there it was a short jump to setting the story in a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-style wasteland,” Stewart said.

The chronicles of the rock trio of Mandy, Megumi and Dot initially got its start in comics anthologies like Rumble Royale and various Free Comic Book Day comics, with short, manic little tales of the girls on the road. The stories were light on plot and heavy on fun. But when Oni editor-in-chief James Lucas Jones approached Stewart and Fawkes about publishing a full-fledged Apocalipstix story, the collaborators had to stop and think things through.

“Not to say it isn’t a lark now, but these were originally very quick ideas that we would bang out,” Fawkes said. “But then making it into a book we had to sit down and get a little more serious about it and make sure it was enjoyable for 150- or 300-page read.”

Initially Apocalipstix was going to be a six-issue miniseries, and Fawkes was going to write the script and then Stewart would illustrate it. But early on when Stewart started doing thumbnails for the first script, he realized the 22-page format was going to be too limiting—he wanted room to expand or contract certain scenes, or alter the pacing to make a joke work better. So Oni and the creators decided to scrap the miniseries idea and publish it as an original graphic novel, which lead to Fawkes and Stewart having a much more organic collaborative process as they worked out pacing and jokes, now freed of the need for page limits, cliffhangers and the like.

“I would say it started off in a very orderly segmented fashion but ended up being more a sort of collaborative jam the further along with the finished work that we got,” said Fawkes.

While the creative duo is going their separate ways for now—Stewart’s off to draw another miniseries of superhero spoof Seaguy for writer Grant Morrison and Vertigo and Fawkes is writing a graphic novel called Junction True with artist Vince Locke for Top Shelf—a second volume concluding the cross-country Apocalipstix trip is in the works. After all, the cute-girl rocker trio still has to get to the fabled California, where Stewart said, “it is rumored that the skies are still blue and the grass is still green.”

And beyond that? Fawkes has an idea. “I’ve already been putting a bug in Cameron’s ear and saying the words: World Tour.”