Writer Jody Houser has been making her mark on comics for years, but 2018 is a year where her footprint has gotten bigger, stronger and stranger.

This week, Dark Horse Comics released Stranger Things #1 from Houser and artist Stefano Martino while also announcing StarCraft: Soldiers – a follow-up to her popular Scavengers series set in the video game universe. The writer has made a name for herself delivering expansive stories of horror and action in licensed comics, and Stranger Things is the highest profile example yet with a story that reveals what happened to Will Byers during his entrapment in the Upside Down.

CBR spoke with Houser about what it takes to make the comic version of Netflix's biggest series feel like it's straight out of the '80s, how she approaches licensed titles for fans new and old and why StarCraft's expansion delivers her scariest work yet.

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CBR: Stranger Things as comics seems like a really obvious thing from a commercial standpoint, but it also must be a challenge because the show wants to keep as many of its big secrets close to the vest as possible. What kind of marching orders did you have going in for the kinds of stories you could tell?

Jody Houser: Originally my editor at Dark Horse Spencer Cushing – I'd worked with him on Halo prior – said "Are you interested in doing Stranger Things comics?" And I said, "YES. A lot." [Laughter] I've done a lot of licensed books before this, and I've gotten very used to work with licensors and publishers and navigating what everyone wants the comic to be. In this case, we did have a bit of free range to decide what we wanted this to be. We had a couple of options sent to us by Netflix, one of them being Will's experience of the events of Season 1. That seemed like a great thing to add value to what fans already know of the show without taking too much of what they want to do away from the show in the future. I always feel a good way to navigate a licensed book like this is to get perspective on things that might be known to a certain extent but not fully.

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The preview pages show us that you're taking the reader in a direction that's different than the show creatively – it's not on TV so there can be no music or quick edit cuts – but still sits strongly in the cultural space of the series. I mean, they're playing D&D. Did you think about those terms?

The big thing for me is being guided by the tone of the show. It's very much a series that feels like it was made in the '80s, and sine this was a comic, I wanted it to feel like a comic you would get in the '80s. That means using things like thought bubbles and narrative captions from a narrator. It was very Chris Claremont. I mean, I'm not comparing myself to Claremont, but in terms of the style, it's very much in line with the comics those kids would have been reading at that time. I wanted to continue that thread of both homage and a product of the time it's portraying.

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The art matches that too. The colors from Lauren Affe are't so far that you're looking at a washed-out, dot-colored throwback, but they do have a kind of faded paper feel to them.

Yeah. And that was something I had mentioned early on. We wanted to the colors to have a retro feel. But then again, you don't want to necessarily go full-out like a comic that seemed like it came out in the '80s. There will be a lot of people buying this who are coming to comics for the first time. I've seen a lot of that with the other projects I've worked on. And you don't want to be something that's so alien to other comics coming out where if they do expand out their reading, they end up feeling lost. It's finding that nice balance.

Speaking of balance, it is always difficult to get the horror feel across both in comics as a format and when the hardcore fans know what happens generally. I can't imagine there are any brand-new monsters or pieces of mythology here to shock folks. How do you keep it scary?

I think very much it's a character study in a way. Will is a character we didn't get to see a lot of in Season 1 because he was gone for so much of it. He was more supporting This is very much his story, and I think even if you know the ending – that he survives the Upside Down – that is still scary. That's a messed up place, and he was there for a while. And knowing what happened to him in Season 2 and how much trauma he had there, there's still things we don't know that are scary. We're leaning into that as much as we can and even playing with some tragic elements. Again, it's keeping the tone but not necessarily trying to reinvent the wheel.

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StarCraft is the other big franchise you're working on with Dark Horse, and that has a huge number of diehard fans. When you come into a franchise like that with recognizability but maybe not 100% saturation in pop culture, who are you thinking of as your audience?

I think the best thing to do is write for both groups of people. If you're a StarCraft fan and you know the world and the species of the world, you're going to go in with a lot of knowledge. But if you're brand new and you don't know anything about StarCraft except that it's theoretically set in space because the word "star" is in the title, then we have brand-new characters that have never been involved in the games. We have a point of view character that's never been to space before. So we try to make it easy for people to get into and discover what's going on in the world even if they've never played the game before.

Do you think about the element of gameplay at all? Do you want the panels to evoke what players see on their screens, or is it more about expanding on the details of that world?

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It was definitely more of the latter, and a lot of this obviously comes form Blizzard and what they wanted the comic to be. This is definitely a much smaller, more personal story than the massive attacks you'd see if it was more heavily influenced by the games. [Scavengers] is much more a horror story, and if you're looking for a difference between Stranger Things and StarCraft, then StarCraft is definitely the darker of the two. My joke for it has been "It's like Alien, except set in space." [Laughter]

This year has been a bit of a level up for you between all these work at Dark Horse and gigs like Star Wars and Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows at Marvel.

I feel like every year has been a level up in some way, but definitely in terms of the profile of some of the projects I'm working on, I've got Stranger Things and Doctor Who and more Star Wars and StarCraft and more Faith. It's a lot of really, really cool projects, so I feel lucky.

Do you have a dream project you're shooting for – either a specific character or a kind of comic you want to do?

There are a few of them, but I always say as a kind of cheating answer that I'm more interested in the dream career than the dream job. Once you do the dream book, it's like...you fulfilled your dream. But if you're shooting for the dream career, you can keep going on forever.