Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, kickstarter

Then It Was Then It Was Dark

Published Sun, 11 May 2014 20:00:25 -0500

Edited by: Sarah Benkin. Work by: Alo Sophia Lenk, Andrew Lytle, Andrew Pungot, Carey Pietsch, CB Webb, Cody Pickrodt, Danielle Riña, David Brame, Diana Nock, Dirk Manning, Ellis Rosen, Elaine M Will, Emi Gennis, Hannah K. Chapman, Helia Milman, Henry Gustavson, Ian McGinty, Isabella Rotman, Jackie Roche, Jen Hickman, Karina Rehrbehn, Karen Kuo, Kasia Banas, Kelly Leigh Miller, Lauren Ashizawa, Laura Neubert, Lea Faske, Lo, Meg Gandy, Molly Ostertag, Mogan Beem, Natalie Leif, Sarah Benkin, Sarah Dill, Sarah Winifred Searle, Simone Angelini, Sires J. Black, Tara Zuber, Trevor Henderson and Wesley Sun. Funding ends: Sun, May 25 2014 Ship date: Feburary 2015

A comic collection of personal paranormal experiences, friend of a friend tales and brushes with the unknown.

Kids have a knack for hidden spaces. If there's a half-filled closet, or a nook behind the stairs, or a cluster of bushes with a well-obscured clearing inside them, they'll find it and make it theirs.

You'll find lots of stories of hidden spaces in Then It Was Dark. Here's one of mine.

As a kid, my preferred hidden space was just outside my elementary school. Still technically on school property, so I wasn't breaking any rules, but as far from any supervising teacher as you could get. It was blocked off on one side by the school's brick wall and surrounded on all other sides by an overgrown bush. If you were small enough there was plenty room to move around and you could disappear completely

My best friend at the time was as into ghosts and the supernatural as I was. I'd read more Goosebumps books than any of the boys in our class and she swore up and down she had a deck of tarot cards somewhere in her basement. We figured that made us experts on the occult. In our hidden space, we'd draw initials on the wall with white rocks, followed by dates like 1967, 1921, 1880, and pretend they were written by whole histories of kids who'd come here before. We didn't have an Ouija board but we knew what one looked like. So we drew letters in the dirt with a stick and put a leaf for a planchette in the center. If the leaf was blown towards one of the letters by a gust of wind (or maybe by one of us exhaling a little harder than normal, by accident of course) it meant the spirits were trying to contact us.

One afternoon, we were among the last kids on the playground waiting to be picked up by our parents. I was trying to engage her in some sort of game that involved ripping up a bunch of dandelions I'd picked. She wasn't interested in it. She was sitting stiff and unresponsive against the wall we'd tagged with generations of fake initials.

Being a kid, I was just annoyed she wasn't playing with me and I ignored her. Ignored her until she slammed hard into my side and knocked me on the ground. The next thing I knew, she was flying at me, fists and nails and teeth and all. We'd gotten into fights before (we were best friends, after all) even hit and kicked each other, but not like this. She was fighting like an animal and was stone silent the entire time.

Of course, I started hitting back, trying to shove her off me and get her to stop. I don't know how long it had gone on before she stopped fighting back and started to scream. Fearing a teacher's intervention, I got off her. We sat in glaring silence until our parents arrived.

For days after that we avoided each other. When we finally reconciled, she insisted it be under the condition that I admit I attacked her, not the other way around. She had no memory of leaping at me. She had no memory of anything before she'd started screaming. And after that, she wouldn't go in the hidden spaces anymore, not even with a friend.

It could have been an elaborate lie. A ruse to make our supernatural games more exciting. But if it was it had a subtlety and craftsmanship her usual lies lacked.

That's my experience…or at least, it's one of mine. How about you? Have you ever seen something you can't explain? Heard a voice speak a warning to you as you drifted off to sleep? Ever see a woman with no face singing to herself on a long, empty road? Ever talk to a killer? These people have. And they want to tell you their stories.

From the strange, nighttime experiences of a man deployed in Iraq to the story of a house haunted by a slightly mad old Jewish matriarch, from a chaplain's first experience performing an exorcism, to the history of spiritualism, to a ghost that seems to love LARPs, Then It Was Dark collects a variety of strange experiences from talented and diverse voices.

True paranormal tales have found their way into prose books before, but I've never been able to find them in comics. Which is a shame, because stories like these all but beg to be drawn.

These stories are up for funding on Kickstarter right now. Backers can get copies of the book, commissioned art, prints and posters and some really special extras for those who give a little bit more. There's also a special offer for Bleeding Cool readers: The first 20 backers to buy the book after this article runs will get $5 off the cover price. And if Then It Was Dark reaches $11,000 by the end of this week (which we're only $4,635 away from as I write this article) every backer will get a high-resolution, suitable for printing pdf of the "Mystery House" image I drew for the Kickstarter last week.