INTERVIEW: Scott Snyder Talks about a Year of Creator-Owned Work

It’s been a little over a year since Scott Snyder left DC to pursue a massive line of creator-owned work at Comixology, IDW and other publishers. A lot has changed across the industry and in the work, so I sat down with Scott to talk about the new genres he’s branching out into, the craft that goes into his storytelling, collaboration and more.

Ari Bard: It’s been a year since the huge pivot, the Substack, almost a huge year with Scottober. So how is all that? How’s it feel?

Scott Snyder: It’s been great! I mean like, honestly, I was scared a year ago. I didn’t know if any of it would work. I didn’t know if anyone would show up for the class, like the Substack, and if it’d be a complete bust. I didn’t know if Comixology would be a good home for the books, and I had no idea, having not worked with them, if they would really give us the creative freedom they said they would and be supportive in terms of pushing the books, all of it. Everything, not to sound like a Disney movie, turned out better than I’d hoped where the books are projects that creatively I couldn’t be happier with. They really gave us so much room to make stuff that was personal to us that we felt were stretching our muscles in new ways.

And on a business side, they did better than I’d hoped, too. I feel very lucky. I don’t know who I killed in a previous life and sacrificed to the demon gods of comics, but y’know, I’m very fortunate.

Ari: With these new deals you’re getting the chance to do totally different genres and stuff that you may not have dived into extensively in your work before. Even in this recent wave, you’ve got YA sci-fi in Dudley Datson and the Forever Machine, you’ve got a dramatic heist in Dark Spaces: Wildfire, you’ve got a Western (which you’re a little more familiar with) and you’ve got a historical romance fiction. What’s been your favorite so far?

Scott: Oh, man. It’s impossible to pick a favorite. I think the goal, like where I’m at right now is, the first wave of stuff was like, “I’m working with creators you’ve seen me work with before in big ways,” like Francis Manapul, Francesco Francavilla (who did “Black Mirror”) and Greg Capullo, obviously, who I’ve done most of my comics work with over the last 10 years. And it’s “Let’s do the kind of stuff that you kinda expect from us, but on our terms.” Stories that we feel completely unrestrained with. And it was great! We Have Demons, me and Capullo, it’s big, bombastic horror action and gore and wrapped in more gore, and all kinds of fun. And then Clear, with Francis Manapul, is sci-fi and even though it’s a slightly different genre than I’ve worked with in sci-fi noir, we did a lot of sci-fi together on Justice League. And ultimately Francesco and I have done a lot of horror together, so Night of the Ghoul was like a classic horror movie mixed with a modern kind of terrifying story intertwined. So that allowed us to do the kind of stuff that we love doing together. 

So from our own perspective, this second wave we’re doing now with Barnstormers with Tula Lotay, Canary with Dan Panosian and Dudley Datson with Jamal Igle, they’re all genres I haven’t worked in as much. I’ve done some Western stuff with American Vampire, but this is a purer Western, even though it has horror elements, it’s really playing with that genre in a way that, with American Vampire, it was more of a soap opera that spanned multiple genres over different times, but it was always focused on that big driving soap opera of Skinner Sweet and Pearl Jones. This is more like, how do you use the Western genre to tell a story about the fears of today, the way Westerns have been applied all throughout history, and the great Westerns have all engaged with the moment in which they come out. And then Jamal Igle, I’ve never done an all-ages book, so Dudley Datson is really designed for my 11-year old, my 15-year old, the idea of making something that adults can enjoy but is young-reader friendly. So it’s a big cosmic adventure about an inventor, a young inventor, who finds himself caught between these big good and evil forces when he discovers a perpetual motion machine built by Daedalus, the fabled inventor from ancient times. All of them, this wave, they’re pushing me in creative ways I haven’t really tried before. So it’s really, this is the most elastic and the most daring that I’ve done.

And then the third wave, which we’re gonna be talking more about soon in New York and other places, as we get further into the fall and the winter, brings it back to that comfort food done with a twist. I’m working with Rafael Albuquerque again (of American Vampire) and Jock, who I’ve obviously done a ton of stuff with over the years, from Wytches to “Black Mirror” to all kinds of stuff. Those books, Book of Evil is a horror book about what happens 20 years after 92% of the population are all born psychopaths, and no one knows why, and it just happens across the globe, that is part prose and part graphic. And then Duck and Cover is about a nuclear exchange that happens between Russia and the United States in the ’50s and the only people that survive are the kids that hid under their desks, like those PSAs. It’s about why that happened and what happens to them, and it’s kind of a manga-influenced post-apocalyptic rockabilly story. 

So all of them are really personal projects that are developed from the ground-up with a co-creator. Not like ideas that I pitched at random and was like, “Who can do this?” It’s like, built with the person, where I go, “Look, I have this basic idea of OK, Jock, what if we do something that builds on all the stuff we’ve done in Wytches and it’s about what if the next evolutionary stage of mankind is psychopaths? How do you feel about that?” And he loved the idea, he said, “Let’s do it!” and I’m like, “OK, do you wanna do a kid narrator? I feel like it should be someone young,” and he goes, “Yes, I totally agree. Let’s make it like a Stand by Me story where it’s like kids that are on a mission to find a way out of this sort of terrible situation they’re in.” Then I go, “Let’s do it!” and it builds from there. We do it back and forth. So each of the books is really individuated and special to me, it’s just that trying genres I’m comfortable with in the first one, trying genres I’ve never tried in the second one, and then doing again big heavy-fisted stuff in the next one.

So yeah, it’s been a blast, man. I’m really overwhelmed with all the support people have shown us with what we’re doing.

Ari: That’s awesome. I mean, I think always leaning into the collaboration element and seeing where that takes you and going on as many directions as that takes you, you can never go wrong. I guess diving into individual books, starting with Canary. It, like a lot of your work so far, focuses on the Gilded Age period between the Civil War and World War I and also the ’20s, post-WWI, before the Depression. And you see that with Canary in the former, and Barnstormers in the latter, so what is it about those times that really appeals to you?

Scott: I’m really attracted to moments that are inflection points in American history, when we really sort of have to re-examine who we are. There’s a shakeup or a dismantling of our own identity to some degree. Like, I’ve always been fascinated by the Old West, even though that spans a long time, this idea of kind of creating a colonial identity and the battle between our worst impulses and our best impulses at that moment, y’know? And how we kind of myth-make and create these legends about ourselves, even as we’re doing some of the worst stuff we’ve done as a people. 

Similarly, the Jazz Age to me, which is the focus of Barnstormers, is this kind of wild stratification of wealth, right? Wherein the rich are partying between this terrible pandemic that happened, the influenza pandemic, WWI wiped out a huge amount of the global population. And then the coming economic crash and Depression on the other side. It’s like this bizarre sort of quiet period where working people faced tremendous anxiety even as all these new inventions and things were popping up that make daily life more exciting and better. But there’s this pervasive anxiety beneath the surface of “Who are we becoming?” and y’know this moment in the Jazz Age, as people are partying it up even as the world is hurting, I think that’s another one of those inflection points. Like, who are we going to be?

And so same thing with like the ’50s, it fascinates me. I spent the longest part of American Vampire on that. I think there’s this intersection of real progressivism with what needs to happen, with both young people and civil rights and women and this very upswell with rock ’n’ Roll and all of this music that are particular to America that don’t appear anywhere else, same with the Jazz Age and jazz, y’know? But then, this huge pushback also against that. So those moments, I really love those moments where we’re really at war with ourselves over who we want to be, and that crash also creates these new cultural phenomenon or these kind of hybrids, these cross-pollinated strange new things that are uniquely American, whether it’s jazz or rock ’n’ roll or blues or a certain kind of film genres, like noir, all the stuff that is uniquely American, right from the 20th century into the 21st century, it’s fascinating to me. 

I think we’re at a moment like that right now. I just think we haven’t been as aware, in the last 20+ years, pre-9/11 to now has been this kind of moment of great change that we’re living through that’s hard to recognize as a point that way. But it is, I think, one. So yeah, those are the moments that really capture my attention, those moments of upheaval. The reexamination of American identity that also produces amazingly wondrous and terrifying inventions, y’know?

Ari: Totally. And I think at this point you mentioned inflection points of great change. I think it’s like this transition between eras that you don’t realize as existing at the time, but then when you look back at it, some things, especially in a lot of the stories that you’re telling, some things have to die and fade away for other things to be born. So you’re looking at Canary and what does Holt want? He’s on the brink of retirement. He’s got novels written about him, he wants to move on. And the West won’t let him, the West won’t let the cowboys live the life that they maybe dreamed of until some parts of the past really fade away or are really dealt with.

Scott: Exactly. I mean that’s what that book is about. It’s like him having had an incident that happened in the West with this murderer that he’s famous for taking down, and the story has this kind of secret horror to it that he’s not articulated to people and is not in any of the dime novels. And he just wants to put it aside and let the myth be the myth and move away. And instead the story is about that horrible thing. The horror is that he saw in the West, particularly this one, coming back to get him in a way and saying, “You don’t get away that easily from it!” Not that he did anything bad in it, it’s more … this is a bigger story than you’d like, bigger than a dime novel. This is bigger than the way it was framed, and you don’t get away that easy. There’s something bigger coming for you. 

And so that feeling, I think, with that book is … we wanted to use a Western and really play with the conventions and elements of that genre as a prism through which to see now. So the murders happening, for anyone not reading it yet, it’s a story of these strange murders happening around this town where people are kinda going nuts and murdering people for no reason around this town where there’s a collapsed mine. This marshall is brought in to help with an investigation into the geology of the mine to see if there’s something poisoning the water. And so it gets darker and darker as it goes. He starts to discover it’s almost more … there could be something supernatural about the mine itself. And it winds up, I think, hopefully speaking to a lot of the fears that we have nowadays, not just of random violence, but who we’re becoming. And a Western is a good way of reexamining that, I think. And I’m really excited about it. And Dan [Panosian], I think he’s one of the unsung heroes of comics. He’s not somebody who gets some of the attention other artists get a lot, because he’s a quieter talent. But I mean his mastery of comic art is just so uniquely his and also breathtaking. Y’know, I could write the phonebook, and it’d still be great, the book.

Ari: Yeah, I mean, visually, I think Dan’s style fits really well to the Western and into the idea of, there’s a lot about facing your past head on. That’s what you’re forcing all of them to do. And that sort of paired with, visually, I think more so than with your other collaborations, you have a comic here that is full of head-on shots, that you sometimes see in Westerns, wherein they pan down from the top and the cowboys are looking straight at the camera. I think the first two issues at least are full of shots where they’re almost never side by side talking to each other. There’s talking to each other, but really it’s at the reader. I think that fits the Western genre really well. That pacing.

Scott: That was really Dan’s idea. This book was, like I saying, like all the other books, a passion project. Going to a co-creator and saying, “I have a seed of an idea, what do you think?” Dan is a huge Western fan, I’m a huge Western fan. We both love particular ones from the ’60s and ’70s probably the most. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and [The Outlaw] Josey Wales, y’know, all of those, The Magnificent Seven, Wild Bunch, and on and on. A lot of the Peckinpah stuff, but also the later John Ford stuff and Searchers. So for us it was, again, how do we use those conventions you’re talking about visually, story-wise, to try and make something that is uniquely ours and is a Western but really blows out the kind of things you’d expect. So it goes from being a pretty strict Western to being one that is almost like, “Well, it’s a tele-Western nowadays.” Maybe this isn’t true for everybody, but it’s true for us, but we felt we’d have to bend the genre in a way, so that you could talk about things that wouldn’t fit in a Western. And how do you do that? Well, you bend it a bit. And you use supernatural elements you don’t normally see in Westerns to give you more breathing room as a storyteller while still staying within the basic boundaries of that genre. 

Ari: I think there are always a lot of mysteries in the Old West, and in order to really emphasize and bring those out, you started out with the horror elements. It reminded me a lot of Severed. I think both in the villains, a lot of sometimes the horror I see from you comes with the men with sharp teeth, in various forms. But also, I think Severed was a book that, it is about a horrific entity that consumes a range of children in a way that I think … this monster that Marshal Holt can’t get past is consuming his dream as an adult, his retirement, he’s unable to move on.

Scott: That’s a really fascinating way of thinking about it. I think it tracks the arc in which I made those books. Severed, made with Scott Tuft, who I love and who’s a great writer on his own, and Atilla Futaki, that book was conceived right when I was about to become a father for the first time, really. And it was very much about “How do you write something that is terrifying about the world not being what your child will come into it hoping it is?” Like a child having a dream of what exists, and having a monster who says, “Not only is that what you’re not gonna find, but I’m gonna use your hope against you to destroy you.”

And now, I think, as somebody who has seen that same kid as a teenager, as someone that has kids that are a little older, sort of thinking about how you’re at a point where, you know, they’re going out into the world regardless of what it is. I can’t shape it for them beyond the little things I can do to help them. My kid’s about to be out there and go to college, all of it. And so I think what Holt is going through, in accepting the world is uglier than he would like it to be, and retire from that and just … that comes back to get him. “Well, here’s your worst fear about what this world is for future generations, and you’re a part of that, and we’re gonna show you how!” And so yeah, they’re interesting echoes of each other in different ways, y’know?

Ari: Yeah, definitely. And definitely very excited to see how it continues. Moving onto Barnstormers, which takes place in that Jazz Age period, I think there’s a lot of interesting craft elements to it. You also mix some war elements here even with these visions that Hawk keeps having. I guess why’d you think that enhanced things? It could have been a more straightforward romantic romp through the action of the southern Midwest. So why bring in that horror element?

Scott: Well, you’ll see I think as it plays out. It’s meant to be more about the anxiety of that moment than it is horror. What happens is you start to realize that he’s not who he says he is. That he’s not this celebrated WWI pilot. He’s somebody else who’s pretending to be that person. And he’s someone who has had his own challenges with mental health and escaped an asylum. So this idea about him being chased by this vision of this mechanical man is explained in #3, like what happened exactly that created this nightmare that he keeps having, that he keeps seeing as a real thing. But it’s more, I think the idea was to do something that feels like an adventure and a romantic romp, but it didn’t feel true to this moment to just have it be that. 

Because I think young people nowadays, not just kids, but people in their 20s, are facing a really scary environment, work-wise, life-wise, debt-wise, all of it. So it felt inappropriate to have a character just like high-flying traveling-around and bumps into this other person and falls in love. It felt like it needed a darkness beneath the surface, that was more about the desperation these two characters feel, having grown up as working class people in a time when the gears are working to crush a lot of young people’s dreams at that time. So that was the idea, that he has the visions of a mechanical man chasing him because of something that happened to him. That speaks to his larger fears, that the world is unsympathetic and is mechanical and it’s run by cruel people. And I think that’s what he’s afraid of and running from. It’s the vision he had at that moment when he had this accident, and he thinks he saw the world as it is, what’s beneath the surface, it’s this cruel machine. And he wants to be above it, fly above it, and get away from it. 

Ari: Yeah. I think that’s great, and I think you put it really well when you said that fear and anxiety are very closely intertwined, but I think you’re right that Barnstormers focuses more so on the latter. The way you — and with good reason given comics is a visual medium — find ways to personify those fears and anxieties, why personify that? Why not let it be a foreboding atmosphere? What does the mechanical man serve, if that doesn’t give too much away?

Scott: Partly because it is such a visual medium, I think the idea for me was somebody who’s haunted by something that happened to him in the past, he had a vision when he’s shocked. He’s asked to do something and he does it, and as he’s doing it at this factory he works at he suffers a tremendous shock. I was reading about people that have had electrical accidents and how it can change your neurology and create sensations and visions and really be disruptive to the trajectory of your life. And so I thought about it: Do I just do a flashback to when he has this incident? Or is it something that feels like it’s appropriate for him to see the world differently, and see things privately that other people don’t see? And that felt better for me, both as a visual motif and just as something experientially as a reader sucks you in more. You’re seeing through his eyes the kind of fears he has about what the world really is or what the country has become and is becoming. And how that manifests itself both physically and emotionally for him is kind of combined into this thing.

Ari: Totally. And I think you can really see that through him. I appreciate, in the first issue at least, the contrast of some of the anxieties that flicker on the fringes. I think the one thing that keeps the first issue propulsive and really dynamic is the use of third-person narrative captions. It keeps things pretty light, and I think even though the anxieties up the stakes a little bit where it’s needed, at the same time the narration really brings the stakes down in a way that, “This is still gonna be a fun time, even if there’s something lurking.”

Scott: Well thanks, I mean the fun and the challenge of doing this many books sort of around the same time is making sure that each book has a very unique voice, and that each book feels particularly singular and its own thing. It doesn’t have any real overlap with the other things just in terms of story tropes or any of that. So it really was like … I’m doing a book over at IDW called Dark Spaces: Wildfire, for example, that’s very different. No supernatural elements, no historical elements, it’s not set in a different time period, it’s very much a heist story that takes place right now. And that one has first-person narration and writing around it the same time as this one. It was like, “Well, I don’t want this one to feel like that at all!” This one is technically first person, but how do I do it so that it reads like third person? I wanna create with that one an immediacy that feels very much about the story as a claustrophobic box, in Wildfire. Instead in this one, I wanted it to feel like opening up as a “Huh,” just easing you in as a fun adventure, wherein you’re hearing it almost in that old-timey kind of third-person narration omniscient voice. 

And then as it goes on, it starts to become more and more harrowing. The voice takes on a personality and a character in the story, wherein you realize you’re listening to someone who plays a part. And all of that is a convention I haven’t tried before but that you see fitting the organic character of the story itself. Where it’s meant to lull you in and feel like you’re listening to an old-timey adventure and then it gets more and more, I think, resonant, hopefully about what it’s focused on as a parallel to things happening now.

At the same time, it’s a deliberate decision then to be like, “Canary, no narration,” y’know? Canary, very stark, very dialogue-driven, very cold, no hand-holding, very uncomfortable. Even the title cards are meant to unsettle and create a sense of dread. Y’know, all those things working at once to kind of push that in a different way and have a different storytelling experience on my end, a different experience for you.

Dudley Datson, which is meant to be fun and inviting, is the opposite. It’s like, “OK, we’ll do first-person narration, but it’ll be from the point of view of a mechanical dog, who’s secretly Daedalus and all of this.” Just, everything about that narration is meant to be a “Come on in! This is gonna be a real romp!” Y’know, in that way, an adventure, a cosmic adventure. So yeah, with each book I’m trying very hard to make something that doesn’t feel like it’s overlapping at all with the other ones and is very much its own thing.

Ari: Yeah, totally, and I do think that definitely comes across. I think there’s very little overlap, for sure. You mentioned Wildfire, another great book that Hayden Sherman’s killing it on. You mentioned the first-person narration there, and that one’s very interesting to me because I’ve noticed that for you first-person narration is common, especially parallel narration, wherein you tend to be narrating something that’s different than what might be visually shown. I go back to Nocterra, and there’s a lot of talking about math while the action’s happening, drawing those parallels at the end of an issue. With Wildfire, what makes it so interesting is you have to convey the grueling work Ma and her team are doing, and that comes across visually, how dangerous it is, how remote it is, how hard that work is. But I think you’re explaining the technical terms of it at the same time, and I think that really enhances each other.

Scott: Thanks! That’s the idea. It’s like very straight-on first person narration, y’know? She’s telling you as she would tell the people that work for her about the dangers, the stages, about the wildfire and how it progresses. And it fits her character, so it’s like, again, trying to do something specific to that story. I almost think of each story as its own planet. Everything has to be organically and holistically of that ecosystem and that planet, so nothing is more like, “Well, how do I bring something in? I need more scares in this!” I don’t think that way with it. How do you make each thing thrive, so that more grows out of it? A sort of vibrant system within itself. And sometimes that means trying things you’re not comfortable with too, and that’s what I like about this. 

Book of Evil, the one I’m doing with Jock that starts in late fall about a world where 92% of the population are born psychopaths and everything runs better than it does now, that one we were like, “How do we do it?” And it felt like it needed to be told from the point of view of a kid in this world. The kids would not really be schooled, because no one would give a shit about them until they present one way or another as a psychopath or not, which happens in adolescence. So ultimately if they have no school, it feels like the story would be claustrophobic. You’re a kid who doesn’t understand how the world works around you. How do you convey that visually? And it’s hard to convey visually, so what if we did it as a prose story wherein you’re listening to the kid talk, so it’s almost like a podcast, wherein it’s a prose book you’re reading, and he draws the things he sees. And so there’s always this kind of, I think, a sense of dread on the page, because you feel boxed in. It’s on black with white writing and spot illustrations. And there isn’t a visual, it feels like you’re in the dark, both figuratively and literally. Again, is that the way that I feel most at ease writing? No, I’m so used to writing comic scripts at this point. I’m rusty when it comes to prose. But that fits that book, it really makes it a scarier read, I think, to not be able to see that world and to be listening to this person talking you through it, who doesn’t know a lot. So I love that book dearly for what it is, like we’re just finishing the first issue now. 

And that’s what I mean, really trying to make organic choices from book to book that support what the vision of that book is. Even if it’s kind of pushing me and my co-creators into a zone that makes us try things we maybe haven’t or aren’t as familiar with creatively.

Ari: Totally. And part of what I notice you tend to do in order to help the books or fit the story that you’re going for is you try to change up the language or the lingo that people are saying or doing to reflect the central premise. And I think that enriches the characters or the world that you’re living in. You’re not gonna learn everything about the science of wildfires from reading that book, but you made it a point to educate everyone and have them use the lingo while doing so when getting into that book. Even Dudley Datson, even though it’s set in the present now to start, even if it’s a fairly mundane high school setting for the first issue, Dudley has his own names already for his own inventions, his “duds.” You use language like Mr. Fat Stacks; it’s not something you hear today, but it immediately brightens up the space, I think. It’s almost a sitcom sci-fi.

Scott: That’s the idea, to give each book its own lexicon, a bit. So you’ll see in issue #2, and it’s funny, because Daedalus comes out of his shell more, talking, and you realize how even though he’s an ancient scholar and Dudley is very much a kid, the two of them come up with their own language or nicknames for things. So there’s a lot. Each book I enjoy and want to feel unique as its own thing. And with Dudley, a lot of the fun is that Daedalus is this ancient scholar and Dudley is a modern day teenager, and so the names they come up with for the bad guys, like The Needle’s Eye and even the inventions that they’re discussing are particular to that book. 

Similarly with Canary, you’re trying to create a relationship between these characters, these geologists, Edison Edwards and Marshall Holt, and you’re trying to come up with things beforehand. You’re like, “Well, Edison Edwards, because he’s Black and it’s the Old West, what if his teachers are a bit disrespectful, even if it’s a bit subtle, and they call him “Ed-Ed” and Holt as somebody less derogatory because he’s just a more empathetic person asks him what he’d like to be called and calls him Doc. And he always refers to him as Doctor. And even small things like that, wherein it becomes … Mayor Gem, y’know? His name is Mayor Gemmer, but he always wants to be called Mayor Gem, because it’s a mining town. Holt won’t call him that, he just calls him Mayor. Those little things. 

If you’re a writer and you’re out there thinking about story, one thing I’d say is, for me, I do really strong outlines of each book, so that I don’t always adhere to them exactly by the time I get to the end, I give myself some room to play, but I do sort of have a superstructure that I generally don’t stray from too much, just because that’s how I figured out how to make it mean something to me — this is the way the story goes. They don’t usually suddenly flip me off that, y’know? I don’t get bucked off that ride by the story. But the place where I really do find life in it is when you do get to know the characters, you get to know the world, and spend a little time making things that feel really unique to that book, that way. So I tried really hard with each of these so that each book feels special in its own right.

Ari: I think Dark Spaces: Wildfire especially really does feel that way, with the five stages of the wildfire as a framing device. With all of the language that Ma and the prisoners use, it’s taking place today, but also the mode is defined. One thing that I thought was interesting after the first issue, within the first-person narration, Ma sort of telegraphs that there’s gonna be a trap, something’s gone wrong, not to spoil the whole first issue, but they’re in trouble, so why’d you decide to show your hand like that?

Scott: I think what you’re referring to is on the last page, where we have a twist, where Ma seems to reveal what’s gonna happen at the end of the story. So I wouldn’t do that if there weren’t two more twists to that, so the fun is like hooking you with “How is that gonna happen?” — that thing at the end that she’s saying is gonna happen to all the women — and then flip it twice more, wherein you’re like, “Oh! That did happen, but wait, what?!” and then “Oh no, it didn’t! And then …” It’s a noir, y’know? 

I love embracing a genre and really immersing myself in by watching or reading a lot of seminal stuff within that. And I think the fun of a heist noir is that it constantly surprises you. Each issue is designed to kind of have an ending or a hook that shocks you a bit, like, “Whoa! This just got way darker or way more dangerous than I thought!” So that’s why that ending. I wouldn’t give it to you if it didn’t get upended somehow.

Ari: For sure. Thank you for taking the time to do this. This wave of books for sure is some of your best work, and you’re diving into a lot of different and interesting places with each book.

Night of the Ghoul #1 will be out in print Oct. 5 from Dark Horse, and We Have Demons is available in trade now.

Ari Bard is a huge comic fan studying Mechanical Engineering so he can finally figure out how the Batmobile works.