I love being able to chat with comic writers and this was no exception. Today is the end of the kickstarter for Diablo House and I hope it gets fully funded (spoiler: it did!) cuz it just sounds so dang cool! Here’ s Diablo House’s writer, Nancy Holder talking about this cool project!
Why are horror and comics some of the genres you chose to write in?
Comics are my favorite medium to write in. I like the stress of compression to get a good story into the script and the collaboration of working with an art team to show, show, show rather than tell. For example, in a comic I wrote about the Domino Lady, a saucy adventuress from the 1930s, I asked the colorist to give her a memorable color of lipstick and to use that color for other things such as a flower or a pocket square in the bad guy’s breast pocket to carry her through the panels on a subconscious level. That’s really cool and really fun!
Yesterday, John K. Snyder III, the artist for my new Moonstone comic series with co-writer Alan Philipson, called Johnny Fade in Deadtown, told us about a movie he’d just watched for inspiration: The House Across the Bay. So we watched it too. We were psyched because there were so many amazing noir images in it, and we knew John was spot on with how he was seeing our first script for him, which we just delivered to him.
Regarding horror, I think we don’t pick our genres. Somehow they pick us. I’m the world’s most easily frightened horror writer. Which is good, because when I sit down to write horror, I deliberately scare myself so I’ll be in the zone. All I need to do is watch a specific scene from the K-Horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters, and I’ll be inspired all day — and sleepless all night. Around two or three in the morning, I’ll wonder why on earth I do this to myself. And then, I’ll start all over again the next night. The Woman in Black works great, too! The hallway scene and the rocking chair scene — YIKES!
How did you like being a part of an anthology like this?
I love it! I loved Creepshow and I just watched Tales from the Darkside: The Movie for an article I was writing about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I love those movies with creepy host guys. Plus I have been watching Animal Kingdom, about a trashy criminal surf-family set in Oceanside, which is a surf town about half an hour up the coast from La Jolla, where Diablo House is located. So there was all this synchronicity in my universe to work on “Chickens for Chompy.”
Is the story here like the one you and your partner are working on?
We have three things in the works: two comic book and prose series, and a short story for the Kolchak 50th Anniversary project. We’re hard at work on Johnny Fade in Deadtown, which is very noir, filled with existential dread and supernatural weirdness. Our other series hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s about a vampire, but it’s about more than that.
Of the three things, our Kolchak story is most like “Chickens for Chompy.”
It has a wa-ha-ha ending just like an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
If you could write anything, no matter how out there it was, where would your creative mind go?
Well, Alan and I have mapped out a trilogy of horror novels and I’d love to get to those. And then I’d like to adapt them into graphic novels. So watch the skies!
