Issue 4 of our horror comic, Survivors’ Club, hits the stores this week. This is probably our most insane issue to date, with guest art by Catwoman’s Inaki Miranda*
In this issue, “Uninvited
“, Harvey’s knife-wielding imaginary friend, Mr Empty, finds himself trapped in the yawning corridors and weird space of the Muskagee House, the source of Simon’s childhood horror and a mega movie franchise.
Horror News Network has a sneak preview. Click here to read the first five pages.
You can BUY IT RIGHT NOW in digital on Comixology.com or in real live paper editions at your local comic book store. (In South Africa, I frequent Reader’s Den in Cape Town and Outer Limits in Cape Town and Johannesburg)
I’m so proud of Survivors’ Club, co-created by me, Dale Halvorsen (aka Joey Hi-Fi) and artist Ryan Kelly with the premise: what if the 80s horror movies were real and where are those kids today?
We’ve been able to riff off our favourite horror movies and tropes, and hopefully subvert them too in horribly twisted and unexpected ways.
We have a diverse cast (including monsters), half of which are women (also including monsters), and we’re also equal opportunity wh
en it comes to horror genres, from supernatural slasher to haunted house, cursed video game to J-horror creepy passenger to disturbing plastic playthings.
When Dale and I were writing this particular issue, “Uninvited”**, we were thinking about one of our favourite books, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves as well as classic movies like The House on Haunted Hill (which we visited recently when we were in the USA for the launch of Survivors’ Club in October – here’s a picture of us, standing, appropriately in an arcade with the first issue hot off the press. Yes, Dale is that freakishly tall).
We also wanted to up the ante on the big monster mash-up movies, like Freddy vs Jason and Alien vs Predator, which didn’t quite pull off the promise and also pitted the same kinds of monsters against each other. Why have we never seen Jason vs Amityville or Freddy vs the Overlook Hotel? Wouldn’t that be way more fun?
And wouldn’t it be great if we could fridge the serial killer?
FOOTNOTES:
* Inaki Miranda, colorist Eva de la Cruz and I previously collaborated on Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom, our J-horror inspired take on Rapunzel set in the Fables universe.
* Yeah, busted, the title of this issue “Uninvited” is a homage to the 80s haunted house video game I played on my Commodore Amiga when I was a kid. This works so well with the other major story unfolding in Survivors’ Club: the tale of the haunted video game.
