Haunthology, a creepy, scary anthology of horror tales by the brilliantly talented creator of Red Mother and Beauty, is available to back on Kickstarter now - and there’s just 2 days left to back it!
The book will be a gorgeous black and white hardcover featuring strange and frightening tales by one of comics’ best horror minds. Beware! These tales are short. These tales are deadly! Every one is a mini-masterpiece.
From the opening story, Hastur (which tells the story of an obsessive love) to The Package, which comments on our consumerist culture, these stories are haunting and thought-provoking. Not to mention filled with all the creeping dread and atmosphere Haun brings to books like Red Mother.
The Kickstarter itself is ram-packed with treats, including original artwork - the holy grail for comics readers! Learn more and back the book right here! Want to know more? read our exclusive interview with Jeremy below…
Jeremy, Thanks for talking to The Comic Crush. You're a talented hyphenate creator. One presumes your pitches have more impact than most when they land on the desk of an editor at a publishing house. Why the Kickstarter route for this?
Well, thank you. I truly appreciate that. I'm grateful every day to be able to have made a career out of telling weird wonderful little stories. 2020...and now into 2021 has been an absolute horror show. If I'd pitched this story sometime in 2019, an editor would've laughed me out of the room and called it "overwhelmingly unrealistic". But here we are. When comics went pencils down, every carefully laid plan just went out the window. I went from an overfull schedule to an amateur sourdough bread baker and master home mixologist. Like so many of us, I was just lost.
I made HAUNTHOLOGY as a direct response to that. Let's be real here-- in the best of times it's difficult to get a publisher to agree to an anthology, much less an oversized hardcover collection of short stories by one creator. One with a ton of added tie-in merch and weird, self imposed rules. Over the past year I created HAUNTHOLOGY on my own. Well -- let me restate that. I created HAUNTHOLOGY with my fans. It was about connection. I needed to continue that in as personal a way as possible.
What freedoms do you have using KS that you don't have working for a publisher?
The first, and maybe most important, is the direct contact with your audience. That's just fantastic. We tend to be pretty reachable in comics. Fans can reach out on social media. They can walk up and have a nice chat at cons (I THINK I remember cons...). That's a special thing. Kickstarter allows fans to be absolutely involved in the creation of a thing. They back something and are directly involved with almost every aspect from then on. It's lovely.
Beyond that, the other huge thing is the ability to do a project with all of the wonderful little bells and whistles. I could've done this as a trade paperback somewhere. It would've been cool. But Kickstarter has allowed this thing to be more. An oversized hardcover? Cool. T-shirts? No problem at all. Free stickers for everybody? Absolutely! That aspect of this project has been sheer joy.
What is it about horror that vibes with you? It seems to be a real passion.
Horror just stuck with me. I love telling genre stories, but somehow they always seem to come back to horror in one way or another. As a kid I was terrified of everything. My "fix" for that was to watch every horror movie at the video store. It worked. I got hooked! I love the way horror magnifies real life. You can use it to comment on the world around us. You can use horror-- fear to say things that you can't always come close to in other genres.
I was surprised at the length of the book and the stories in it. Was it a matter of doing stories at this length in part for the sheer discipline of it?
There wasn't a real plan, going into HAUNTHOLOGY. I just had this need to tell stories. The rest kind of came later. HASTUR, the first short was three pages. The second, KINGDOM OF DUST AND BONE, was just one page. I loved that. Comics tend to be a pretty set length. You tell the story, come what may, in about twenty page chunks. This was different. I could literally tell a story that was just a moment. I didn't need to have it fit into a larger thing. It was absolutely freeing.
As I went, and realized I had an actual book on my hands, I started to mess with the structure a bit. I started to make rules to entertain myself. I'd challenge myself to come up with a one page story or let myself go and see if I could do something that ran longer. The longest story in this volume is ROOMS IN THE FLAT HOUSE, at fifteen pages. I started out thinking it was going to be seven pages. It had other ideas. I embraced it and it's one of my absolute favorite stories in the collection.
One presumes the length made it easier for the artist (haha)?
To a degree. Writer me isn't always nice to artist me. I'm constantly deciding that it would be fun to have a page that has sixteen panels, or is set in some elaborate, ever-changing mansion. That sort of thing can be maddening. Cool to look at. But maddening.
I'm willing to bet that a Kickstarter with it's all or nothing caveat can be something of a horror story in itself. Was this the case for you? Did you find it to be a white-knuckle way of making comics?
Do I lose my cool aura of confident mystery if I say that the days leading up to this Kickstarter were absolutely terrifying? It's a weird thing to work on something for a year-- something that you absolutely believe in with all of your soul, and then have to put it out there in hopes that people like it enough to make it happen. I mean, look-- to one degree or another that's just making things in general. But there's something extra vulnerable about Kickstarter. It's all or nothing.
Do you ever worry about the effect that such dark subjects have on your mind, or is the creation of horror stories a catharsis and therefore a good thing?
Naaaaaaahhhh. Not at all. You know what terrifies me? All of this (you can't see it, but I'm waving my hand at the world around me). Telling these stories is my respite from all of the chaos of the way humans treat one another in the real world. I get to unpack all of those feelings. I think it's a pretty healthy approach to it all.
Who influences you?
Everything. How's that for an answer?
Errrr…
Crappy, I know. I'll do better. Even if my first response really is pretty spot on: In prose I'm constantly inspired by Laird Barron, Nathan Ballingrud, Thomas Ligotti, John Langan, and Joe Hill. All of them manage to tap into something that just...connects with me. They hit on this... humanity and then veer things off in a way that just gets under my skin.
In film and television it's folks like John Carpenter, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Fuller, Ryan Murphy, and Noah Hawley.
In comics it's Mike Mignola, Junji Ito, Walt and Louise Simonson, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Jon Hickman, Bill Sienkiewicz, Kelley Jones, and Stuart Immonen.
I could really go on and do more for each, get into music, animation, painting, architecture and more. But I'm going to be honest-- lists make me want to take a nap.
It’s an amazing pool of influences. Going back to ‘artist you and writer you’, are you able to separate the artist and writer in terms of scheduling your working day?
Ugh. Not well. This is the part where artist me is kind of an ass to writer me. See-- everyone loves to do the "writers be like this/artists be like this thing". It's all tough. We all (EVERYONE-- colorists, lettererers, designers, and editors too) deserve massive raises for what we do. We're all lovely and special and wonderful. That said, drawing things is just brutal. It's long long hours sitting there hunched over a desk drawing all of those little space ships that jerk writer me keeps sticking into scripts. I'm starting to literally fall apart because of all that time drawing.
Because of all of that time at the drawing board, my writing time really has to get cut short. I'll end up spending ten to twelve hours drawing a page and then still try and sneak in an hour or two to write. The best solution I came up with was having different spaces for both things. I draw here in the studio and then have a separate office for writing. It's really the only way I can stave off the pull back to the drawing desk.
Did you find the shortest stories in the book easiest to create first, or did you work right through, in order?
There wasn't really an order. The stories came out as expressions of what I was feeling at the time. Sometimes I'd work on a particularly dark story and need a bit of levity for the next one. Other times I'd work on a longer form story for a month or two and do a shorter story along the way just to finish something.
Do you see yourself expanding any of these into a full length OGN or series?
Definitely a bit, yeah. I don't know that it'll be exactly the same things, but almost all of these connect to my larger mythos. You're going to see some of these characters pop up in other stories. A couple will even appear in really big ways.
And that begs the question all creators must be asked as soon as their big project is out: What are you doing next?
After the Kickstarter? I'm going to sleep for like...four days. Then I'm going to get back to it. There are more stories to tell. I've got the final issue of THE BEAUTY coming out in September. After that I'm drawing a pretty lengthy OGN, writing two all new mini-series, prepping for this big thing that I'm both writing and drawing, AND working on HAUNTHOLOGY Volume 2. I'm kind of exhausted just talking about it.
Oh, and of course, I still need to get HAUNTHOLOGY Volume 1 in everyone's hands. My local post office is going to LOVE me for a while...
It’s another horror story! Can you name some favourite horror comics that our readers should be into?
Wow. There are a lot lately, aren't there? For a good while horror comics felt a bit rare. Less so now. So many of us grew up watching and reading all that horror and now we're just making some terrifying things for it.
HELLBOY is always going to stand as one of my favorite horror books. Mignola just makes magic. His entire Mignolaverse is fantastic. I can read that stuff any time and be happy. Both Cullen Bunn and James Tynion are making some of the best horror comics out there right now. I love both guys and proudly pick up everything they do. I'm not one of those people that really differentiates between American comics and Manga. I read and love it all. That said, Junji Ito is probably the greatest horror storyteller out there right now. If you're not reading Ito's work...you're truly missing out. I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton of brilliant people. But again...lists. Fighting the need for a nap...
We’ll let you go in a moment, promise! Was there anything in the book that made you pull back and reconsider putting it in? Anything too horrible to print?
I held off on a couple of stories. Two were definite responses to the political climate in 2020. I just didn't feel like they were quite ready yet. They might make it into volume two. They might not.
One story that definitely didn't make it in was a tribute to my grandfather. We lost him in October and I just had to write something-- say something about what he meant to me. I looked at it and realized it wasn't a HAUNTHOLOGY story. It's just something for me and my family. I like it that way.
So sorry for your loss. I imagine when this sort of thing happens, one tends to look to the future. In that regard, Would you do another KS? What did you learn this time around that would prepare you better next time.
Definitely.
Maybe?
I think...
I suppose I'll know better once I get this thing fulfilled. That's a whole other thing. I went into this Kickstarter thinking I was ready for everything. I wasn't. No matter how much you think you've prepared your updates, stretch goals, and the like, it isn't enough. Next time I'll have even more things clearly in place. I'll plan my stretch goals out well WELL beyond where I think I'll need them. I'll also have a better filing system. Trying to find things quickly is just...brutal.
You know what? I'm going to go back to it. Will I do another Kickstarter? Definitely. And probably pretty soon.
We’ll definitely be looking out for it! Congratulations on your success with Haunthology and thanks for taking the time out to talk to us. Now go get that nap!
