October is a big month for award-winning comic book creator Scott Snyder's creator-owned publishing imprint Best Jackett Press. Partnering up with ComiXology and Dark Horse Comics, Snyder is teaming up with superstar artists to release three new and original titles -- We Have Demons, Clear, and Night of the Ghoul. Snyder reunites with acclaimed creator Francesco Francavilla for Night of the Ghoul, a creeping tale with an ancient evil force menacing a remote care facility that's interspersed with clips from a lost World War II-era horror movie. Closing out October, Best Jackett and ComiXology are releasing a sampler, providing a look at all the upcoming Best Jackett titles coming out in the coming year.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Snyder teased the claustrophobic terror of Night of the Ghoul and explained how the sampler and Best Jackett's mission statement aligns with his hopes for the future of the comic book industry. Included with this interview is the standard cover for Night of the Ghoul #1, created by Francavilla and lettered by AndWorld Design. Also included is a preview of Barnstormers #1, drawn by Tula Lotay and colored by Lotay and Dee Cunniffe, which will be included in the Best Jackett sampler released on Oct. 26.
Rounding out this initial trio is Night of the Ghoul and is this the first time you've worked with Francesco Francavilla on interiors since Detective Comics?
Scott Snyder: Pretty much!
He did an issue of Swamp Thing with me all the way back when. He did a short story in American Vampire, but we haven't really had the chance to go big together in a long time but we've been close friends. Francis' family visits mine and Francesco and his wife Lisa get along with me and my wife and Greg is like family so one of the fun things is to revisit these old friendships and do things that surprise you together. Night of the Ghoul is probably the oldest of all the books because Francesco and I first talking about it in maybe 2015 and we started teasing it a few years ago because we were tinkering on it even though we didn't know where it was going to come out and how we were going to do it.
That one is really fun and is about a guy who discovers what he believes are the remnants of the lost classic Night of the Ghoul, one of the great horror movies of the 1940s that was destroyed in a studio fire and has all this mystery surrounding it. The writer/director vanished when it was destroyed and people died in the fire and it's supposed to be this great classic. He finds the pieces and tracks down the writer/director who's almost one hundred years old and in this hospice care home in the middle of nowhere. The guy admits who he is and says, "You should have never have come here because the ghoul is in this building and going to kill us all tonight."
The story intercuts between this claustrophobic, terrifying night that focuses on these interviews as things get more horrible in the rest home and the original fragments of the film, which Francesco is doing in black-and-white with burn marks. It's one of my favorite things that I've ever worked on and I'm so proud of that one. Francesco is just killing it, doing all this stuff like making fake lobby cards and having a blast. He and I both love classic horror so he's rolling around in his element and it's amazing to see.
This feels like a big love letter to the history of horror cinema but what made you want to do this as a story-within-story or did that just lend itself from the premise?
It was the premise that attracted us to it where all the things, like the mystery around it, are fun elements. What the story really centers on is the myth of the ghoul. The ghoul is a creature that some people worship -- and if you believe the legend around it -- has been around longer than almost any other living thing on Earth and hides in a human host. You don't know if there are many of them or just one and it forces the human host to eat dead material and inside of you, it creates all these different kinds of diseases, pestilence, and plague until it's ready to release them. When your body is at the end of its life cycle, it leaves and finds another host and releases these things when it comes out.
Over the cycle of about a hundred years, it builds up enough to create a mega-plague and it's responsible for the myths of all these other monsters like vampires and zombies. With vampires, it was from a disease it created in the 1200s where it causes blood to not deteriorate after a very long time so bodies would look fresh and it engendered this myth of vampires. In the 1700s, it caused this brain-eating bacteria to make people seem like zombies and eat flesh -- that's where the myth of zombies comes from. It's like the granddaddy of all monsters but no one has ever seen anything about it or if it exists or not.
That came to me and Francesco as this idea that, now, the ghoul shows you that all your little drama and things that make you feel divided rather than banding together to build a better future by overcoming these systemic and entrenched problems don't matter in the face of what this thing is going to create. It wipes out civilizations every few hundred years and is this looming terror and, if it's real, then it wipes out civilizations that have become too fractured and enamored with division. It's a story that's about this moment, like all of them are, but comes at it at a very different angle, feel, and aesthetics all-around.
With all these additional books coming out afterward, what made you want to put out a sampler?
The reason they're calling it Scottober, which I'm just going to lean into and embrace is that every week in October, we have another release: We Have Demons on Oct. 5, Clear on Oct. 12, and Night of the Ghoul on Oct. 19. On Oct. 26, we're going to have this sampler out at a low price of 99 cents or something, and the sampler gives you a preview of all the books we're going to do over the next year. It was important for me to get it out there because I wanted to show people the range and the incredible breadth that my co-creators are achieving with these stories. We have everything from historical fiction and romance, like in Barnstormers, with Tula Lotay, to manga-influenced post-apocalyptic fiction in Duck and Cover, which I'm doing with Rafael Albuquerque, to mixtures of prose and illustration in Book of Evil, which I'm doing with Jock.
I want people to see that we're serious and the whole purpose of the line is to push ourselves with things that we find creatively exciting and what we believe in for the industry. We partnered with ComiXology because I genuinely believe that digital and print have been held in competitive spaces for too long. The future of comics is the marriage of digital and print. Print is collectible, tactile, and communal and people go to the comic book store for the same reason that they always have -- to find other comic fans and get things they love for their shelf. Digital is the place where, for the price of one comic -- even though it probably makes more financial sense for me to say to buy every single of ours individually -- with a subscription to ComiXology Unlimited, you can browse all these people who were once my students and are now exciting voices in comics. They have this huge library of all these classics that made me want to write -- like The Dark Knight Returns and The Sandman -- free for subscribers and you get our books for the price of one every month and we'll have three out.
What I wanted to do with the sampler is try to give you a sense of how big we're trying to go and why we're doing it. We want to show that we're creatively all over the map because we want to try to push things for ourselves and business-wise. Why we decided to partner with ComiXology was because we believe in what they're doing. When books come out in the direct market, they made a special deal with us where We Have Demons we can do in single issues, with variant covers and all that so they come out in a way that helps the direct market. Browse so you can find writers and artists you love on ComiXology Unlimited then go to your store and buy the things for your shelf.
To me, that's the future of comics, that model. Maybe I'm wrong but I believe in it wholeheartedly and the way ComiXology has supported a lot of new and emergent voices -- some are former students of mine. I'm excited people might be using our books as a gateway to discover all these other great series and talents in comics. The reason I'm doing that and the teaching on Substack -- which I hope people will do because it's been a blast with this Comic Writing 101 class you can sign up for on Substack -- is the same exact reason. Get a subscription on ComiXology Unlimited, find books that you love for an affordable price in these crazy-ass times and get the stuff you love in stores, meet people, go to cons and be a community. And then make comics, do it better than us and change the industry because it needs new voices. I've had a great run in comics and still have stuff I want to do but put my money where my mouth is and create a position where it's not about making books for myself but making books in a way that is at where I think the forefront of this industry is headed and invite people to be a part of that because I believe we have a healthy future if people lean into the trends and embrace them.
Written by Scott Snyder and published through ComiXology, Night of the Ghoul #1 is illustrated by Francesco Francavilla and launches Oct. 19. The Best Jackett Press sampler will be released on Oct. 26.