‘The Neighbors’ Interview
The writer of the upcoming Boom! comic The Neighbors, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, has one acclaimed comic series under his belt already, but may be more well known for the non-fiction he has written. Doyle’s second published book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, was a Kirkus Best Non-Fiction Book in 2019. Despite all the accolades Doyle has received for his non-fiction work, he calls the trade paperback collection of his five issue Boom! comic Maw, “his favorite thing ever.” While graciously answering CSN’s questions, Doyle offers insight as to why the comic medium has captured his attention.
The horror genre appears to be a favorite of yours. What is it about the comic format that lends itself to horror?
Horror works differently in comics than it does anywhere else. You still need a plot, and you still need characters worth caring about, but the format doesn’t really allow for shock or jump scares. It all comes down to building a visually compelling world and a set of haunting images. There are some comics whose plot I’ve long since forgotten, but certain panels will stay with me for years; Uzumaki, by Junji Ito, works that way for me. You’re just floating in this horrible atmosphere, seeing people turn into snails, and you might not understand or remember why they turned into snails, precisely, but the image can’t be unseen. When I Arrived at the Castle, a graphic novel by Emily Carroll, has a really simple plot, but the atmosphere and the imagery are so baroque and Gothic and fantastic that you fall into the book and can’t come back out.
What horror books, comics, and/or movies have influenced you?
I’ve always loved horror that is very beautiful and stylized and atmospheric – David Lynch works in beautiful images, for instance. So does Guillermo del Toro, who was someone whose work I referred to often when I wrote The Neighbors. There are writers like Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter whose work is just really lovely and sensuous on the way to giving you nightmares. Writing horror comics – as opposed to a novel or a screenplay or anything else – really is an invitation to luxuriate in atmosphere and world-building and imagery, and I think that’s what makes those comics so powerful.
You’ve described Letizia Cadonici (artist of The Neighbors) as having “witchy, haunted art”. What qualities of her art best lend themselves to your writing and/or ideas?
Letizia Cadonici was such a surprisingly perfect partner for this project. I had written a script that was very visually dense, thinking of something like Del Toro’s Crimson Peak, or the 1963 Shirley Jackson adaptation, The Haunting, where every frame is just over-full of symbols and things drawing your eye away. Letizia’s approach felt radical, because her style is so spare and almost minimal. She cuts away everything but the most essential part of the image. Yet that spareness is so evocative. Her characters are just incredibly expressive. There’s a single panel in the first issue of The Neighbors that showed me exactly why she was perfect for the project. I had written that a guy shows up on someone’s porch at night. Nothing spectacular, he’s just a dude, knocking on a door. For some reason, Letizia’s drawing of that panel gives me primal terror. I can’t point to exactly why it’s so powerful, because it’s so simple, but this man standing in the dark on the porch is like a nightmare I had as a kid. He’s such bad news. Her work has challenged me to be a better writer.
Some of your previous work focus on the power of women and the struggle against a patriarchal society. Will The Neighbors incorporate these themes as well?
Maw comes from a place of really deep despair and rage. It draws on my work covering sexual assault, and the feeling, which I had in 2017 or 2018, that I had just been writing the same article over and over for ten years, watching the same cases play out in the media for decades, watching rapists get away with it, be excused, be exonerated, my entire life. Generations of people, mostly women, had been organizing to fight sexual assault and abuse, and nothing was getting better. Nothing I tried was helping. No-one had solved the problem. People, mostly women, were still being hurt. What do you do when you no longer believe the world can be saved? What do you do when your own anger and trauma are eating away at you, and there’s no good or useful place to put them? If the world can’t get better, shouldn’t it just end? That’s what Maw was about. It’s the bleakest thing I’ve written, and I think that bleakness has power. There are people who have written to me to say that Marion made them feel heard, that they got some kind of relief out of knowing someone else was that angry.
The Neighbors comes from a different chapter in my life. I’ve spent the past few years coming to terms with my own identity – as a queer person, as a trans person, and most importantly, as a parent. There are still a whole lot of people in this country who believe that queer people – and especially trans people – are unfit to parent, and should have our children taken away from us, lest we pass on the contagion of our queerness or gender non-conformity. There are still a whole lot of parents who abuse their trans children, who believe it’s better for a child to be dead inside or traumatized for life than it is for them to be authentic in a way their parents can’t handle. So much of the legislation against trans people in this country comes down to what children are allowed to learn in school, what they’re allowed to look like, what games they’re allowed to play, even what words they’re allowed to say.
It can really wear away at you to live in that kind of climate. There’s very deep fear there. One of the characters in The Neighbors, Oliver, is a trans guy, and he’s agoraphobic. That feeling, that you don’t want to leave the house, you don’t want to see anybody, because you don’t know how strangers are going to treat you – I was writing about a very personal feeling, when I came up with that, just slightly exaggerating something from my own life. Yet what I’m realizing is that it’s a place that a lot of trans people reach, mentally. I wanted to write something that might show people how exhausting it is to live in a state of constant hypervigilance, how it feels to live with the suspicion that everyone you meet hates you.
So The Neighbors, without giving away too much, is about a very beautiful place where something bad happens to children. It’s about the forces that take children away or pressure them to be something other than who they are. It centers on a family, the Gowdie-Shiptons, where both parents are queer, and one is trans, and the question of whether parents like that – or children like theirs – are safe in this beautiful little place where nothing happens. And that’s all I’ll say. It’s still about gender, because everything I write is about that, but it’s a whole different set of questions.
The Neighbors #1 (JAN230302) is solicited as a changeling horror series steeped in Irish and English folklore and mythology.
