IDW‘s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is an enormous hit. Not only did the recently released trade of the “cozy horror” series hit number two on ICv2’s sales charts, just below Marvel’s monster hit Ultimate Spider-Man, but every issue of the initial series sold better than the last. And as just announced by IDW at New York Comic Con, not only is Beneath the Trees getting a sequel series titled Rite of Spring, but the publisher is essentially building a whole horror line around it called IDW Dark.
“It feels fun to have a little home to work and put these books out,” Horvath told Comic Book Club. “I really didn’t anticipate a future of this thing as I was making it. As soon as issue two of the first book, it seemed pretty apparent. I was like, ‘Well, I think we’re gonna do more. It would be crazy to not do more…’ We started talking, what would that book be, and then the new format and everything is gonna be awesome. I’m very excited to have longer format issues.”
In Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, we meet Samantha, a normal bear living a normal life in a normal town. Except when she goes out of town, she uses the opportunity to unwind and brutally murder unsuspecting fellow animals. That is until another murderer appears in her hometown, unraveling her whole life.
While Horvath couldn’t spill all the details about Rite of Spring, he is able to tease that we’ll jump forward in time… If the first series was ostensibly set in the ’80s, this is set in the ’90s. And yes, the “Rite of Spring” title is purposeful on many levels. Not only will the setting be different, but the format will also be different. Instead of six issues, Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring will run three double-sized issues. So the same page count, but a different release schedule.
In advance of the announcement, Comic Book Club sat down with Horvath in Artist Alley to discuss the success of Beneath the Trees, what to expect from the sequel, and much more. You can listen to the podcast version of the conversation below, or read on.
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Comic Book Club: So since we last talked, and we talked when the book was still in process, I don’t remember which issue you came on the show. It’s like three, four, something like that. It was already an enormous hit, but every issue sold more than the last. ICv2 put up their list of trade best sellers, and the trade just came out, and this was number two, after Ultimate Spider-Man.
Patrick Horvath: [Laughs] Yeah, bananas…That was nuts.
What do you attribute that to? Why are people responding to this book so hard?
We had the right book to have at a very specific time, and we just caught a wave. Obviously the book was resonating with people, and that’s terrific. All the groundwork laid with the evolution of creator-owned stuff over the past decade prior primed everything for this book to have an audience ready to jump on it.
Something like Stray Dogs coming out… I’ve said it many times, but the Venn diagram of fans for that book, and my book is almost a complete circle. From the amount of folks that are looking for something that is cute and it’s also sweet, but it’s also horribly disturbing and strangely upsetting in ways they maybe didn’t think there was going to be when they started reading it, but then also has an emotional core to it that they weren’t expecting either. A lot of the time, horror can devolve into a flippancy with human life or just life. That’s something I don’t respond to, necessarily. Having a book like this come out caught people off guard in a couple of different ways.
And then the word of mouth went nuts on this book. The amount of hand-selling that was happening in shops just blew me away. Even with customers in stores, telling other customers, even while they were standing in line talking about stuff. And so all that weird stuff, and the fact that it seems like such a wrong thing to do with these cute animals that I do in this book [is why] people will at least be curious enough to give it a look. And then once they do read through it, they see there’s more going on to the book than just the serial killer bear thing. There’s a lot of strange exploration of interior lives that happens, and grief that happens, existential midlife crisis that happens, and stuff like that. It’s all that stuff wrapped in there. I just happened to have a book that was doing that, at the time.
Samantha, though, the main character… She’s not good.
[Laughs] She kills and not in a cool way.
Why do you think people identify with that?
Technically, Samantha’s the worst person in the whole book. You have Nigel… Nigel comes up as the other killer in town who holds her in high regard and has these notions of emulating what she does. And the thing of it is, he’s very messy and he’s chaotic, and she’s very orderly, but technically, she’s killed dozens and dozens of people. He’s killed a handful and has brought to life what she’s been doing. Arguably [he’s] a chaotic force for maybe finally bringing her to some sort of accountability. And instead, everybody’s rooting for her to get rid of Nigel and hide what she’s been up to.
It was such an interesting challenge of how to take a character that should, by all accounts, be a total villain, and instead have everyone rooting for her to put the world as she knows it back in order. Things I really leaned on were having that chaos versus order… It’s honestly the type of thing where everybody can relate to having the rug pulled out from under you, from something that you didn’t even think was going to be an issue, and then having it get way out of control. And then the relief that comes from setting those things straight. That weird reliability was my end point to having that connection with readers. It’s totally fascinating to me that it works.
Because, in Samantha’s case, her orderly nature is impunity to kill people.
It very much comes from efficiency and the random quality of it. It’s 100% just to not get caught. There’s nothing righteous about what she’s doing. It’s very bad.
You did a prequel for San Diego Comic-Con that wove through some of the things in the main book.
So the prequel is essentially the first time Sam acts on these urges that she’s had for a long time, and it finds her 20 years prior to the start of the events of Beneath the Trees. She’s fresh out of college, backpacking in Germany, trying to find herself, basically, and then comes upon the scenario that catches he by surprise. And then she finally decides, what if I’m gonna do this? I might as well, [this is] the time to do it. And that’s basically what the ash can is.
The big announcement here at New York Comic Con, there’s going to be a sequel series.
Yes, there is. We’re doing another book. That’s wild.
What can you tell about this? The title is Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring, but that’s pretty much all we know.
I really wanted to have a setting for it that was going to make an interesting evolution off of the first book. So this book’s gonna be set around, like, eight years after the book we just read, and in that time in between, we catch up with many of the characters that survived the first book, and we see how the last eight years has affected them, the repercussions of stuff that’s happened with the first book. And then also, psychologically, beyond the regular, day-to-day, nuts and bolts stuff.
If the first book was the ’80s, this is essentially the ’90s. Now the internet’s a thing. Now corporate land development for urban sprawls is happening. It’s the wooded areas that [Sam] really liked are becoming smaller and fewer. So she’s feeling the world getting smaller. And then there’s gonna be element from her past that’s gonna show up and makes her reassess a lot of what she’s been up to. She’s going to take a real interesting angle on it.
If the first one is about chaos versus order, what’s the thematic thing you’re dealing with here?
This one’s very much what I would call, a modern era, moving into a future era, and her feeling like she’s losing her place in it. Modern versus future. And she feels the crunch.
Rite of Spring certainly implies a couple of potential things: time of year, potentially some sort of rituals as well. What can we take away from that?
Sacrifice is a really interesting theme that’s going to come up in it, and then also that Rite of Spring, the Stravinsky “Rite of Spring,” very much involved sacrifice. It has pagan connotations. There’s also the second part of “Rite of Spring,” that literally has, if you see the performance, the dancers are in bear outfits that show up when they have the young woman that’s being used as the sacrifice. And then also, bears come out of hibernation in spring. It felt like such a fitting setting for this story to take place. Also, that initial book was essentially set in October, the autumnal equinox, and now we’re coming into a vernal equinox, and it felt like an interesting place to start this story.
What’s it like for you as a creator, as a writer, artist, returning to this world again? What did you learn? And how do you challenge yourself?
Anybody worth their salt is going to take the opportunity of doing a limited series as a possibility that it might be ongoing. If you’re listening to this, you’re thinking about making comics… If you’re ever given the opportunity to do a series, sew it up nice, but leave room to grow because you’re going to do yourself a favor. So with this, I’m super thrilled that it panned out… After issue one, I was immediately like, oh, I could totally see where I could take this. I was already having a lot of ideas of, what I wanted to do if I ever got the chance to do more.
Challenges-wise, the first book 100% had the benefit of catching people off guard. And now people know what to expect, and you run the risk of playing the hits versus doing something interesting with it. The one thing I would say with the first book, it was incredibly encouraging to get as weird as I wanted to get with it, and to have people respond really well. So it’s going to be fighting the urge to do whatever I do know worked well in the first book, and maybe leaving that little island of safety for something more undiscovered that I’m not sure how it’s going to land, but I’m feeling drawn to do. That’s going to be the big challenge for me.
Since the inside covers were newspapers in the first series, and you’re jumping forward to the ’90s, are we going to get web pages this time around?
We’re still working it out. That’s entirely possible.
One other part of this is this is IDW is building a line around you in a certain way with IDW Dark. How does that feel?
Super fun. It feels fun to have a little home to work and put these books out. I really didn’t anticipate a future of this thing as I was making it. As soon as issue two of the first book, it seemed pretty apparent. I was like, “Well, I think we’re gonna do more. It would be crazy to not do more…” We started talking, what would that book be, and then the new format and everything is gonna be awesome. I’m very excited to have longer format issues. And the fact that it’s going to be three longer format… Myself as a writer, I’m always a three-act fella, so it lends itself perfectly for that type of thing. Even the first book to be honest with three acts, like issues to issue, you know, one and two, three and four, and five and six. And I basically treated each chunk as like an act.
Is it going to have a different trim size? Is it going to be larger at all?
It’s going to be the same size and it’s going to be a longer format, basically a double issue.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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