Normally, for our 31 Days of Halloween celebration, we’re providing little capsule reviews here on the ‘ol website. But what’s scarier than shaking up a pattern, right? That’s pretty scary? Maybe? Well, something scarier than that, if you can believe it, is Little Visitor & Other Abductions, a new anthology book from writer and artist Adam Szym, which debuted last week from Oni Press.
“My favorite feeling that horror can give me is a sense of unease and dread, and successfully striking that tone is something I work hard to hopefully achieve,” Szym told Comic Book Club over email. “When I read horror I love to be given just enough knowledge to be able to make some of my own guesses, and that’s the kind of experience I want to provide as well.”
In the volume, Szym presents three tales of eerie terror, including the Ignatz Award–nominated A Cordial Invitation, the titular Little Visitor, and Frolicker. The middle story channels a mock documentary style to tell the story of an E.T. knockoff production that went horribly wrong. A Cordial Invitation is a spiraling descent into madness right out of Outer Limits. And Frolicker is folk horror with a sci-fi twist.
Want to know more about the book, as well as Szym’s approach to horror? Read on.
Comic Book Club: The main tone I’d apply to all three of these stories is “unsettling.” How do you manage to find a balance between revealing information and keeping things mysterious?
Adam Szym: That’s the tone I’m certainly going for! My favorite feeling that horror can give me is a sense of unease and dread, and successfully striking that tone is something I work hard to hopefully achieve. Knowing what to make explicit with the reader and what to imply or suggest is hard, though, because you don’t want to frustrate or confuse people. I put all of the information that matters to the story, to the characters, there on the page. Some of it you might have to read the story a second time to register, but it’s there. When I read horror I love to be given just enough knowledge to be able to make some of my own guesses, and that’s the kind of experience I want to provide as well.
Art-wise, I’d put your style in the realm of Charles Burns, but how do you see it? What are your inspirations?
Burns is incredible and very inspiring, but I don’t think of him as a major influence on my work visually. It’s hard to pinpoint what has influenced my drawing. When I first started making comics I could see very clearly that I was influenced by a lot of Franco-Belgian cartoonists, and some of that is still there but in a very different way. When I look at my characters I see a lot of manga influence, too, but I can’t even really say who. I wish I had a better answer, I trust readers more to be able to see where my work came from!
Similarly, from the story perspective, this is all very Outer Limits/Twilight Zone… Given the enormous amount of stories in this genre, how do you find a fresh angle?
I was a huge Twilight Zone kid. I loved the all-day marathons on Scifi Channel on Labor Day and Memorial Day, those were so exciting to me. So that’s definitely an influence. But I also just love horror and sci-fi short stories, which are often structured very similarly to those TV shows. In some ways it’s not too hard to identify a fresh angle when you find one if you’ve watched enough and read enough to know what ground has already been tread. I definitely get ideas and this discard them for being too familiar. It’s a bit instinctual, I guess. That being said I’m not the most original man in the world!
All three stories are about people who are lost in different ways; what draws you to this particular theme?
I think people becoming lost, or in this case taken, is fertile ground to explore a lot of ideas. How did it happen, why did it happen, how did people react to it happening, there’s so many potential angles and viewpoints on an empty space where someone should be standing but isn’t. I realized after making these stories that this theme also allowed me to dig into some things that frustrate and scare me about society, about institutions, and how they treat people and especially children. There are so many ways young people get “taken,” today, literally or figuratively.
Do you see them plot-wise connected at all? Do they take place in the same weird world?
I don’t really, although there’s a fun background detail in A Cordial Invitation that implies a connection to one of the other stories. But that was just to make myself smile. Only one person has ever called it out to me! I do like the idea of a connective tissue between one writer or artist’s stories, though, it’s always fun and I’m sure there will be those kinds of connections between some of my stories in the future.
Living in this dark space, is this something you want to return to? Or would you like to tackle a trilogy of stories about how beautiful flowers are, next?
Haha well I don’t know about flowers but I will say that horror isn’t really something I intentionally go out of my way to make. I love every kind of story, and would be just as happy working on a comedy or a romance as I would on a horror story. That being said the ideas that come to most often, and the ones most worth actually pursuing, are horror stories. So I have a LOT of ideas for those, and only a few for other kinds of stories. I won’t be doing any alien abduction comics for a long time but I’m excited to do some more scary stuff.
Little Visitor & Other Abductions is in stores now from Oni Press.
It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time to curl up with a comic book or graphic novel that will scare your socks off. With that in mind, we’re posting a new horror book to check out every day of October, for our 31 Days Of Halloween Comics. Awoooo! Looking for the rest of our picks? Check them out on the Halloween tag.
Comic Book Club Live Info:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.