Hey guys, it's Scott.
It's the last week of February and we have a lot of exciting stuff going on at Best Jackett. First, today is when Night of the Ghoul #5 comes out. It's our penultimate issue and to mark the occasion, I'm gonna put some series extras here for you to browse, some designs and sketches from Francesco.
This is the issue where all the shit hits the fan right before our shocking, twisted finale, so I'm very excited. This is one of those books that has seemed to gained a real cult following and it means the world to both me and Francesco. It's a book we've been talking about for a long time and I can't wait for you guys to see #5, out today from comiXology Originals.
Secondly, super important, We Have Demons #1 is coming out from Dark Horse in print with extras. It's got the script, it's got designs, and it comes out March 23rd, but the final day you can pre-order it is this coming Monday. That’s this coming Monday, the 28th of February. So, please, please order it through your store, order it from Dark Horse. We have a bunch of amazing variant covers from it. We just announced yesterday that we're doing a special exclusive Peach Momoko cover which I love that's going to be signed by me and Greg Capullo.
For every fifty issues ordered by your store, you will get one, and it’s super rare. We have variants by everybody involved the Best Jackett, so Tony Daniel, Jock, Jamal Igle, Tula Lotay, Rafael Albuquerque, Dan Panosian, Francis Manapul, Francesco Francavilla, and one by Ariela Kristantina as well. So, really thrilled. Pick your poison, they're great covers.
And the truth is, the higher you push these sales, the more likely it is we'll be able to do single issues with other books as well. And that's the whole goal of doing this digital first program for us, to show the ways in which digital and print can be synergistic. I really, really believe in subscription-based browsing and then having more money to go to the store to collect what you want for your shelf in a special way. It's how my kids shop, like I've said a million times, for manga. It's why I think manga shelves in the bookstore are so full and I think it's a large part of the future of comics. So, I hope you'll support us. Again, We Have Demons, please, please order by Monday. I'm going to keep reminding you annoyingly, but, again, it's all so that we can do more of this going forward with more of our Best Jackett books.
Also, comiXology. I got asked a few times about the interface, the changeover from comiXology to Amazon, folks asking if we had any regrets having so many books with comiXology. But the truth is, not at all. I mean, I knew the interface was coming, same as everybody. I think I didn't know that there'd be the level hurdles that there are with the reading experience and the grouping and organization. But the truth is, I know everybody at comiXology and they're incredibly committed to giving everybody the best reading experience possible. They're deep in, like, dyed-in-the-wool comics folks from Chip Mosher all the way down. And so, I'm perfectly confident that they're going to fix it, and I know behind the scenes they are working really hard on it. But also, the flip side is that I also know that exposing the library on comiXology to the whole Amazon readership and marrying those algorithms is going to bring a whole new audience to comics that's going to make it worth it. I mean, they really are growing pains and expansion issues, so for me, in the long run, I'm really convinced things are going to be bigger and better. And I'm not just saying that. But on top of that, we love working over there, we have all the creative freedom in the world. Everybody got a great rate and we own all the ancillary rights, the film and TV rights for all of our books. And then, like I said, they come out of Dark Horse. We're very excited to be starting to come out in print as well. So, I hope you'll continue to root for and support comiXology. I really have total faith that it's going to come back bigger and better than it was before and I'm proud to be a part of that.
Also, because it's Night of the Ghoul Day, I figured I'd do a quick post about horror—two underrated horror films that I love. I figured this is something I can keep up over the year coming. So, Night of the Ghoul came from me and Francesco Francavilla, in 2016/2017, talking about our favorite classic horror, mostly because it was a way of escaping the tumultuous and crazy times that were beginning then. And we started talking about how to create a new classic horror monster and story for modern times. And that's really where Ghoul came from. But, for me, I love all horror. I love horror going all the way back to the 1800s to now. My favorite book, in all of literature, is Frankenstein. But I'm fascinated with American horror, particularly in the last sixty years.
So, in the fifties and before that, horror was kind of exoticized—where things came here to scare us from space, from overseas, they're invading forces. And then in the sixties, you see so much psychological horror emerging as fractures in the American psyche. So, you see Psycho and all the later Hitchcock movies. Then, towards the end, you see all these things like Rosemary's Baby and Polanski, where you're seeing our own dark desires coming to the forefront. And in the seventies, it goes real nuts where you see depravity, hyper-violence, all of that kind of stuff with everything from The Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre—that real new kind of slasher genre. And at the end, you start to get things like Halloween where it moves into the eighties, which to me is a decade largely about the marrying of the psychological and the big slasher to create new kinds of indigenous, iconic horror monsters that are Americans. So that's where you get Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, things like that. You get franchise monsters that are ours.
And you also get homegrown things, and Stephen King is kind of the totemic author of this. You have homegrown, iconic American things like Americana becoming scary. So, he was one of the geniuses of turning things that you find safety in in America into the monster, so your family dog, the little pet cemetery down the road, your car (Christine), the nice old ski lodge hotel down the way in Colorado (The Overlook)… It was all about making things that we find comfort in as Americans—the scary things like a little symbol-crashing monkey, a truck, all of that. Finding horror in the every day in the small town. And so, for me, I think what I love about the eighties into the early nineties is that it's a real search, I think in a lot of ways, for creating homegrown horror where there's almost an evaluation of the things that are symbolically American and finding scariness in those things in a new way.
And so, two movies that I think really reach for that and try to create something new—one is a new version of old monsters, and one is a whole kind of new set of brand-new monsters—are Near Dark and Nightbreed. I saw them both in the theater. I was a kid, I was like 10 years old and maybe 12/13 years old, and they both like stayed with me forever. And there were so many movies I thought about talking about here, from Pumpkinhead to The People Under the Stairs to super dark, more modern ones like Martyrs and Possessor and Under the Skin. There's so many great categories of horror, I think in the last fifteen years, that have had some incredible entries. But, for me, I love these movies.
Nightbreed just stayed with me over and over and over because it's directed by Clive Barker of Hellraiser fame, it stars David Cronenberg, of Videodrome and The Fly and all kinds of body horror fame, which is amazing. And it's about a guy, Aaron Boone, who starts having dreams about a place called Midian, which is the home of monsters. And it's all these new, indigenous, strange monsters that live underground in this hidden place. And it turns out that the therapist that Aaron Boone is talking to about these things is a serial killer named Button Face. It's a zany movie, but it's so ambitious and wonderfully weird and it really does strive for this sense of a new, almost American genealogy of monsters and I love it for that. It's got big, big mythology and it's definitely worth checking out.
The other is a cult classic, Near Dark. Kathryn Bigelow, the amazing director of Point Break and Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty fame, directed this, and it stars Lance Henriksen of Aliens and many other great films and Bill Paxton in a seminal role of his. It's about vampires in the Southwest and it's very American. It was one of the big inspirations for American Vampire. It was sort of, “how do you do vampires in an American way, where they've been here for hundreds of years and fought in the Civil War?” And they're almost like outlaw cowboys. There's nothing European about them, there's nothing foreign about them, there's no sense of vampirism being something that's infecting us. Instead, it's something that's a homegrown bloodline. It's one of my favorite horror movies of all time. It's incredibly dark and twisted and also romantic and fun. So, you should 100% check it out.
So, a couple of recommendations there. If you like these, I'll throw in a whole bunch more next time Ghoul is up, and we can talk more anytime you want. But again, thank you guys so much for everything, I'm having a blast with this. And thank you for supporting the books. You're the best fans in the world!
S
P.S. I wanted to take the opportunity to give another shoutout to all my friends doing amazing original work over here on Substack, so check out this post to get a taste of some of those projects:
Newsletter #54: A Terrifying Twosday