Kim Dwinell Shares the Origins & Future of Apple TV+’s Latest Hit

Surfside Girls, the latest Apple TV+ original series, has arrived, adapting the graphic novel series of the same name by Kim Dwinell. Both the comics and their television adaptation follow best friends Jade and Sam and their adventures in the coastal Southern California town of Surfside, which contains a surprisingly haunted history and is populated by ghosts. Drawing from her own life growing up surfing with her friends, Dwinell is ready and eager for Surfside Girls to reach even wider audiences while she continues to work on the popular graphic novel series.


In an exclusive interview with CBR, Dwinell shared the personal origins behind Surfside Girls. She praised the Apple TV+ adaptation for bringing her story to life for the screen and hinted at what good-natured adventures the next graphic novel will have Sam and Jade get into next.

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CBR: Surfside Girls channels those pulpy young detective stories like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew… except the ghosts are real! What were some of the influences you had in creating this story?

Kim Dwinell: There are a couple of things that fed into the pot of soup that became Surfside Girls. One of the things was the very first Indiana Jones movie, and it was really just an adventure movie with a guy chasing stuff and swinging on stuff with whips. I was 12 or 13 when it came out. With the Ark of the Covenant, it was a crazy, supernatural scene, and all of a sudden, it accelerated out of an adventure film to show that the universe is bigger than you know. Something stuck in my head as a young one that there’s more out there, and this showed me that.


I really like stories like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter where there’s the world, and then there’s another world that the special people know about, but the Muggle people don’t; I love those sorts of things. When I was a kid, I used to watch my little grilled cheese sandwich in front of our black-and-white TV showing reruns of a show called The Ghost & Mrs. Muir — it was a movie, too, but they made a TV show of it, too, and it was old when I was young. A woman moves into this old Victorian house on a cliff by the ocean, and it’s inhabited by the ghost of an old pirate captain, and it’s sort of a love story. To my five-year-old self, there was something really cool about that, and those were some of the things that fed into this.


What was it about juxtaposing that supernatural story with a coming-of-age tale?

12 years old is my writing voice because I think you’re so safe at home, with none of the responsibilities of anything — unless you’re living in horrible circumstances — and you’re starting to see relationship things open up. The world is bigger than it used to be when you were ten or eight or six. 12 is the brink. What I remember about [being] 12 is that I was the oldest, and there were some who were the youngest. Those were the people who had older brothers who knew stuff, and I knew stuff. I watched the world expand in that way, too. There’s something about a relationship with a pirate boy ghost that really can’t go too far. [laughs] It’s cute, and there are giggles, but at this point, we’re playing in a world where it’s unattainable and kind of safe and flirtatious and cute; that’s where we live in this world.


In having Surfside Girls adapted into a show on Apple TV+, how was it seeing what director America Young and the writers brought to adaptation?

I cannot be happier! Mostly, and nothing against men, but strong women came onto the show, and they get it. These two girls are tweens, and they’re awesome. They were some really strong women figures who came on in different capacities to this show. People ask me if I had to give a lot of notes, and there’s no fighting small battles about calling things this or that or making it look different, but I didn’t care. What I was going for is for a strong, brave, fearless, smart girl in the ocean. That’s my message, to get out there and be strong and awesome.


Everyone coming on was like, “Yay! A strong girl in the ocean!” So it was very easy for me. America and May Chan are amazing, but there are so many women who came onto this who were all shepherding Sam and Jade, making sure that we were keeping this in a certain space for young women.

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With Sam and Jade’s friendship as the emotional core of Surfside Girls, was there anything in the show’s performances or writing that stood out or made you see them a bit differently?

One of the things that they did really well in the writing… To be honest, I’m kind of Sam, and Jade is my best friend Melissa. She went on to become an aero engineer on a full-ride scholarship from the Army to MIT while I was at community college taking watercolor classes, surfing, and lifeguarding. We could not be more different, but I wrote them from my experience with that. The writing picked up on that Sam is intuitive, artistic, and has a kind of wild imagination and [is] someone who is still sort of in that childhood. Jade has science, reason, and logic. They were there in my writing, but they saw that, and they just pushed.


With the supernatural very prominent in Surfside Girls, what is it about coastal Southern California that really speaks to those storytelling possibilities?

Surfside is the place that I think we would all like to live. It is this sleepy beachside town where it’s safe to ride your bike or skateboard around when you’re 12, and everyone kind of knows each other. We all know that Southern California is a bit bigger than that, with the suburb running all the way down the coast. I kind of have this moment in time that maybe existed 50 years ago, but it’s present-day [in the story]. I tried to capture this Brigadoon sort of thing, a very happy summer of [being] 12 with your best friend in the golden sunshine. When they were looking for shooting [locations], California is expensive, and they looked at other options. To be honest, you can’t find these colors or this sunlight; this is Southern California. That’s what I paint. I’m so happy that we ended up here.

I think setting [it] in that idyllic-ness and having a deeper story underneath it… In my books, the ghosts are what this land was before I was here. We’ve got Native American ghosts, vaquero ghosts, and pirate ghosts because we did have a pirate; his name was Hippolyte Bouchard, and he was Argentine, which is an amazing story. He burned Monterey and raided San Juan Capistrano. I tapped into some of that and fictionalized a bit of it, but I did want to honor the past because this land is eternal, and this beautiful, sunshine land has been other things to other people.

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After the second Surfside Girls book, you released a spinoff, The Science of Surfing: A Surfside Girls Guide to the Ocean. What made you want to pivot to a fact-based title ahead of a third main Surfside Girls book?

That’s a really easy answer — you talked about what a lovely place Surfside is, and I was starting this [third] book in January 2020, and then I’m watching TV at night and seeing that we’re all going to die, and I couldn’t find Surfside. I was terrified and not in a happy place and thought that I couldn’t write a mystery about this lovely, peaceful, idyllic place because it just wasn’t there for me. I always intended to do the science book, and it started out as a companion guide on how to surf in case people who read the books would love to try that, so here was a way to get them started.

As I was thinking about it over the years, I meant to do three mysteries and then The Science of Surfing book. I thought that [readers] should really know about the tides, the swells, [and] swell direction because they’re important and that just built out into the natural world we encounter when we’re out surfing. As I was in this place of not being able to find Surfside, I called [Top Shelf Productions’ editor-in-chief] Chris Staros and asked if I could flip it with the [science] book out ahead, and he said yes. I dove into research and it, was so much better because it was all facts on how the moon and tides work. [laughs] It was cut-and-dried. There was no emotion to it.


Can you offer any update on the next Surfside Girls book?

A book has never taken me this long. This one is called A Clue in the Reef. I try to stay with my Nancy Drew titles. It’s 253 pages, and I’ve got 40 to go and sketch, and then that goes out to Chris. We’ve got a TV show coming, and I’ve got interviews and launch parties, and I’ve never been pulled in so many different directions. I teach, too. Every day, I’m knocking out a few pages, but normally I’m a machine. The machine has been functioning at a much slower rate right now, but it’s a lot of fun.

The book starts out with the girls in prairie dresses, bonnets, and granny boots because it’s Surfside Days in Surfside. They have to go work at the burger stand, which is now the Burger Dude Ranch. [laughs] It’s harkening back to the 1800s, and Sam wants nothing to do with it. Finally, they’re able to throw off their dresses and go surf, and they discover something out in the ocean that makes them go, “What is this?!” They’re going back and forth between working this burger stand, with all these weird people coming through town, and a bunch of weird stuff, too, that they’re trying to chase down with their Journal of Weird.


Even though these are ghost stories and mysteries, there’s always been an inviting quality and reminder to have fun. How important is that to the DNA of Surfside Girls?

It sounds really lame, but I’m sort of driven by fun. I’m out paddling every other day and surfing with my son. I put a high premium on fun and teach my college classes like that, putting in my syllabus that they’ll learn this and this, and they’re going to have fun because I teach animation. We’re working in a world where you’re making stuff up and hopefully enjoying that world, tapping into where their passion is.

What’s funny is my kid is a cello performance major at university right now, and he’s interested in film scoring. I wasn’t really nailed down to my drawing board at the age of 21. I was surfing and lifeguarding every day. Whenever I push him a little bit, he’s like, “What were you doing at 21?” and I thought to myself that all that I’m giving to these books comes out of when I was in the ocean every day, getting knocked off my board by dolphins. There are so many things, like putting my hand in the water, seeing leopard sharks, and being able to see all the way down, that was all real. I could pull that up because I was there. Living your life is important to art.


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With this being a big year for Surfside Girls, both in television and comics, what are the things you’re most excited to share about this world you’ve created?

That message has always been young girls can do anything, and there’s so much of that right now. When we were pitching this, I was referencing Carissa Moore, the gold medal surfer who was getting prime time with the Olympics. We were also watching those young snowboarding girls, and they’re 12 or 14, flying above half pipes, and they’re awesome. I think we’re really in a great space for young tween girls, with no limitations. I’m hoping young girls take that away, that they have a brain to solve things with and also are strong and can get out there to do cool things.

Developed for television by May Chan and directed by America Young, Surfside Girls is available to stream on Apple TV+.

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