The DC Universe is about to get a whole lot more unsettling with the new roster of creepy crawly villains coming to the pages of Justice League Dark, the brand new magic-focused team made up of fan favorites like Wonder Woman, Zatana, Swamp Thing and Detective Chimp who operate out of the newly constructed Hall of Justice's basement. But of course, they need someone -- or something -- to fight against. Joining the ranks of the horrifying Upside Down Man, the Otherkind, a whole race of deeply unsettling, deeply gross creatures are coming to make things even harder for the team.

CBR caught up with writer James Tynion IV at Comic-Con International in San Diego to get the inside scoop on the Otherkind's terrifying plans, as well as take an exclusive first look at their character designs courtesy of artist Alvaro Martinez Bueno.

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CBR: What is it about Justice League Dark you hope fans take away when they're reading it?

James Tynion IV: I wanted to sort of tap into the same vein as when they read Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing and some of the books that basically formed like the early Vertigo, you know? I'm very excited to tap into that and to still keep it grounded in [the main DC Universe.] They are operating out of the basement of the Hall of Justice. In "The Witching Hour," we see Wonder Woman and Zantana like reporting to the League. But also, this is the scariest of the three books and that's really what I really want. Like, this is a book about what frightens the scariest people in the DC Universe.

Speaking of "The Witching Hour," we know that the main villain for the event is going to be Hecate, the Goddess of Magic. What can you tell us about her?"

I'm leaning into the concept of the triple goddess. There are three faces of Hecate and one of them's really pissed off. What we're going to see is that there are a handful of characters that she's placed a piece of her power within around the DC universe basically to hide and protect that power. There were always been five of the "witch marked" and we're going to see that Diana may in fact be one of them.

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That's going back to the start of JL Dark #2, where we're going to see Diana, like around 12 years old, wandering into the woods of Themyscira following the Witch Women doing their rights to Hecate. So that's something that's, that's something that's going to come into the book very quick. And this is, and it all ties into the larger mythology that we're doing.

I'm taking all of these kind of disparate elements of DCU magical history and finding the connections -- particularly through the, of the villains of the series, the Otherkind, and the Upside Down Man. They are beings of pure magic. They are the original owners of magic from whom magic was stolen. And Hecate may have been involved with that. The original Lords of Order may have been involved with that. Nabu definitely has his own opinions on all of this.

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Let's talk a little more about the Upside Down Man, because that design went public and I'm fascinated by it. How does this guy talk? How does he move? What was that design process like?

I'm really lucky on this book because I'm working with Alvaro Martinez and the team we worked with on Detective Comics, with Raul Fernandez and Brad Anderson. Honestly the things that he does with a page layout are just stunning. When we started talking about what we wanted to do with the villains of the series we wanted to use, we wanted something more rooted in like a Junji Ito, J-Horror, body horror style. The entire kind of race of beings of which the Upside Down Man -- they're like these nightmares. I threw out this idea, and Alvaro came back with this big image of all of these horrifying monsters.

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EXCLUSIVE: Otherkind designs by Alvaro Martínez Bueno

I wanted to create something that is different -- a lot of DC's magic comes out of kind of Gothic quarter. It comes from the traditions of the old horror anthologies and things like rain and gargoyles and vampires. And you know, that's great, but it's also older. Horror has moved a few generations past that to the point that I think sometimes one of the biggest problems you run into when you put together a bunch of vampires and werewolves and all that, it's not that scary on the page. You have to really work at it to make that scary.

So we wanted to put the team up against something that is so unsettling -- the Upside Down Man talks very politely while he just walks in -- it was that image that I just had in my head. Imagine being in a room and just of someone starts walking towards you on the ceiling, smiling with spiders dripping from him. And he's just one of them. He's only the ringleader.

Justice League Dark #1 is on shelves now.