I’m Kris Bertin, author of a few books of short stories, screenplays that never got made, and Hobtown Mystery Stories, a collection of surrealist small-town folk-horror stories published with ONI Press, and I’m here to introduce you to Little Visitor & Other Abductions and interview its author Adam Szym.
Adam, I’ve been a fan of your work since I read A Cordial Invitation, which was really fun and challenging (in a good way), and was so excited for these stories, both because I loved your work but because I love the subject matter. Hobtown Mystery Stories Volume III is called The Secret of the Saucer, and while it couldn’t be more different from your project, I knew I wanted to have some UFO/alien/paranormal cross-promotion, and this interview is what I suggested (selfishly knowing you’ll have good, interesting questions of your own when it’s my turn).
Congratulations on this book. It’s sharp, disturbing, and, like any good abduction, haunts its victims long after it’s over! What brought you to making a collection of stories about things that aren’t supposed to be there (but are)? And what is your relationship to “the phenomenon,” personally and creatively? Lastly, and most importantly—do you believe? Why or why not? (For the record, I’m on team Yes I Do).
My interest in alien abduction stories started when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old. I happened upon one of those documentary shows about UFOs and abductions that seemed ubiquitous on cable television in the 90s, and it was one of the only times I can remember watching something that genuinely scared me enough to give me nightmares. I don’t remember many details but I remember the feeling it gave me: a sense of overwhelming unease and mistrust of my surroundings. But, as with many nascent horror fans, that feeling was as alluring as it was unpleasant. I sought out more paranormal shows and films, and of course The X-Files became a big deal for me.
But my attraction to that material, to that particular tone and visual language of paranormal and UFO-related media, was sort of forgotten until I worked on Little Visitor. That story came to me quite fully formed, and I wrote and drew it fast. Soon after a bunch of other ideas came to mind — two of which would later become A Cordial Invitation and Frolicker — along with others I may never get to lest I pigeonhole myself as “the guy that makes alien comics.” But once I had those few ideas I knew I wanted to put together a thematic collection of stories.
As for whether I’m a believer, I guess the most accurate thing I could say is that I’m agnostic. I 100% believe that alien life, even intelligent alien life, exists in the universe. As for whether they’ve really visited us I don’t think I know enough to give a real answer. It’s always been hard to sift through all of the noise surrounding the subject to find the kinds of information really worth diving into, which has discouraged me from doing the research I’d need to do to give a confident answer.
That being said, if absolute proof came out tomorrow I wouldn’t balk at it or even be surprised, really. It’s hard to discuss this kind of belief, because saying one doesn’t believe automatically implies a dismissal of people’s lived experiences, or at least perceptions, which is something I don’t want to do.
My interest in these kinds of stories is less about their potential reality and more about how much they can resonate with the world around us. UFO and alien abduction stories are about people being exposed to the idea that things are not what they seem, that things are being purposefully withheld from us or manipulated in some way. They’re about awakening to a truth, or a truth being stolen from us. Anyone alive today knows those feelings, unfortunately. The idea of “abduction” also allowed me to explore some real-world events that frightened me as a child, and other ones that are frightening me today.
Compositionally, this book is quite unique. It’s an anthology, and though there are only 3 stories, they’re big enough in terms of scope and concept that I’m still thinking about them. On the page, you wax and wane from mega widescreen panels to pages that have layouts that reach Tintin-esque numbers (I think I counted 16 panels at some point). The decisions herein seem carefully chosen for each story, and allow for a drastically different mood, even while the linework and character design is largely uniform. To what degree are these choices intentional, and what were the more difficult choices you had to make to realize this project?
Page layout and structure is one of the most tools in comics, and so it’s something I think about a lot. You have to find the right form and establish the right rules for every story, especially in horror where cultivating and maintaining tone is paramount. Little Visitor uses a documentary framing so I knew I wanted to lean heavily on the visual language of that form: a talking head interview structure with those pages featuring a very regimented layout. That is then punctuated by scenes that take us out of the documentary and show us events that are transpiring beyond the view of the people being interviewed. It made sense to make those scenes “widescreen,” as it were, to convey to the reader that they are outside of the structure, seeing something secret.
With A Cordial Invitation I wanted to make something more airy and open, to convey the protagonist’s feelings of being lost somewhere large and overwhelming. That story was also informed a lot by 30s and 40s cinema. I wanted to achieve that kind of gauzy, dream-like look some films of that era have.
Frolicker’s dense layouts were a result of both the feeling I wanted to convey and the density of the story. I had 40ish pages to tell this complicated story so a higher panel count was a practical necessity, but one that I would have gone for anyway as it hopefully conveys a claustrophobic feeling that mirrors the protagonist’s frame of mind.
Can you tell us about your cover design and where you found your inspiration for it? (PS: I know the answer—people like me have been programmed since childhood to pick up any book with this font and layout—I’m just giving you a clean set up).
The cover design is inspired by the Time Life book series Mysteries of the Unknown which had these wonderfully evocative commercials that played regularly on TV in the early 90s. Those ads intrigued me and scared me in equal measure as a kid, and I really wanted the books but never mustered the courage to ask my parents to buy them. When I first decided to make a collection of abduction stories I knew I wanted to mimic the design of those books, and Oni Press’s designer Winston Gambro did a great job capturing that essence.
In the titular story, we’re watching a documentary about a failed “family friendly alien movie” and the resulting horror. Was your diminutive “friendly alien” design from Little Visitor an effort to find a balance between cute and horrifying and if so, where do you think you landed on the spectrum? Did you take any design cues from UFO lore for your other space crafts/creatures? Also, how scary is E.T. (classic or Turkish) anyway?
I didn’t find E.T. the creature scary as a child, though the tone and visual style of the film is something that unsettled me. Little Visitor was inspired by a Wikipedia rabbit hole dive I did one night into all of the various copycat films that were made around the world following the success of E.T. Most of the creatures in them look hilariously awful, and it made me think a lot about how perfectly balanced the design of E.T. is. It’s alien and inhuman and kind of gross in a way yet somehow remains totally endearing despite that. The creature in Little Visitor is implied to appear cute to the adults but show its true form only to children. When it was revealed I wanted it to look eminently evil, but in a way that you could imagine those afflicted with the haziness of Adult Goggles might convince themselves it was cute. I took inspiration from the dead eyed staring and translucent skin of deep sea creatures.
For A Cordial Invitation the masks the partygoers wear were inspired by the varying portrayals of Gray aliens in witness sketches over the years. I wanted to play with the idea that while there’s this archetypal Gray every person might have a different interpretation of it, which is why all of the masks are slightly different. The black material of the ship, ring, and other objects in the story was inspired by the descriptions of alien crafts being made from materials that don’t exist on Earth.
In Frolicker I wanted to work with the archetype of lizard people, shapeshifters operating behind the scenes in society. It felt right for that story and the kind of manipulation that’s being employed in it.
A Cordial Invitation ushers the reader from one disturbing moment to the next, barely pausing to allow us to take it in before stunning the reader with the uncanny. Playing with scale, form and vertigo-inspiring bodily discomfort, the story follows a young woman as she stumbles into an extra-terrestrial (extra-chronal?) ritual sacrifice, but doesn’t offer any simple conclusions. In fact, the story seems wholly content to leave the reader overwhelmed, turned around, and horrified. Can you talk about your work’s relationship to the unknown and the unknowable from a horror point of view?
I know it’s an acquired taste but I really love when fiction throws me into the deep end or starts in media res. There’s something about that feeling of trying to keep up that appeals to me, though of course it’s a difficult needle to thread. I really wanted A Cordial Invitation to be rooted in the present tense. I wanted the reader to feel overwhelmed alongside Luisa, the protagonist, and to have the same sense of growing unease and confusion she would have.
With any of my stories I have a very firm idea of exactly what is going on behind the scenes in terms of plot, but its important to find the right balance between what you reveal explicitly and what you don’t. I like horror that has a lot of negative space and unclear answers, but of course “The Unknown” can also be a crutch for writers and a point of frustration for some readers. I’ve found that a lot of readers never pick up on the “extra-chronal” elements of A Cordial Invitation, for example. That’s disappointing in a way, but I’m not sure I would make it any more explicit than I already have because it wouldn’t be explicitly clear to Luisa, either.
In Little Visitor the “unknown” is kind of the entire point, and yet that story is probably the most explicit in terms of what’s really going on of the three. Crucially, though, it’s only the readers who are privy to the Truth. In Frolicker the boy is being purposefully kept in the unknown, to a degree. Things are being withheld from him as a means to an end.
That negative space is something I think about a lot when I’m writing, because it’s easy to go too far in either direction, and perhaps I have at times. I can’t see my own work objectively, so for me that’s the real Unknown!
Frolicker tells the story of a pariah on a ring planet with a stiflingly mundane agrarian Terran society that is so stiflingly mundane that our protagonist is overwhelmed by ideas of violent retribution. It me think of “V” and “Harvest Moon” (for SNES, of course) and even the Columbine massacre. It also made me think about “hypernormalization” (the concept and the documentary), which is the idea that the more bizarre, violent, fake and stupid a society becomes, the more normal this same absurdity becomes to its members. Maybe I’m way off here, but for our protagonist from Frolicker, I wonder if the “threat” is more a threat from within a society than from without. In living through the last decade of modernity, I’ve perhaps overfilled my head with political garbage to explain what’s around us, but I can’t help but feel like in an era of anarcho-capitalist AI tech freaks and our outright slide into fascism and genocide, the monster isn’t out in outer space, in the unknown, it’s here. In reading Frolicker — and even Cordial — I felt like the thing you were grappling with was more familiar than uncanny. Can you talk about how this political moment informs your storytelling?
I wonder if your question is the first time “Harvest Moon” and “Columbine” have been uttered in the same sentence.
I’m hesitant to put too fine a point on things, but the world around us certainly wasn’t far from my thoughts while writing these stories, although it wasn’t until I nearly finished each that I realized what exactly about the world led me to write them. What I did know going in was that I wanted each story to be about young people and the ways that they are harmed, or simply failed, by adults in positions of power.
I grew up Catholic. We were never a super religious family, but it was a part of my life. I think the most radicalizing event of my life was when the truth came out about child molestation in the Catholic Church, revelations that first came to light in the region where I grew up. Of course I already knew that there were people out there that hurt children, but the idea that an entire institution on the scale of the Church would tacitly SUPPORT those crimes on a systemic level effected a total and permanent alteration of my worldview.
There are a lot of people in the world who, consciously or not, view children and young people as objects, tools, means to various ends. They use their fragility to fear monger and manufacture consent for their political or industrial goals. We see it all the time.
The aliens in each of these stories are largely in the background, and that’s not just an aesthetic choice. Unfortunately, as we all see in the news more and more every single day, abduction is not just something that extraterrestrials do.
I know you’re a parent of a young child (as am I), so I was wondering how the experience of fatherhood has changed you and your work. Were the imperiled children in this story the result of paternal anxieties or did they preclude them? How has becoming a parent changed your relationship with storytelling and especially horror?
Becoming a father has changed me in a million ways, big and small. How could it not? It changes how you see everything about the world. That being said I don’t think it changed these particular stories much, which were conceived prior to all that. Though as I was saying they certainly reflect anxieties I have about how the world can treat children and young people, anxieties which have only become more pointed and powerful since becoming a father.
Having a child has definitely changed how I connect with storytelling, and particularly horror. Prior to becoming a Dad I could handle basically anything in horror, but now if I have a suspicion a new horror film might feature a young child being harmed I’ll check a Wikipedia summary beforehand.
Like many new parents I also now regularly tear up at idiotic commercials just because they feature fathers and daughters. Becoming a parent makes you into such a sucker.
When one publishes a work of fiction, we’re sharing some pretty scary stuff. Not just your likes and dislikes, your style and aesthetic, but also your presuppositions about the world. Sometimes what an author takes to be “normal” can be just as disturbing as what they think is weird or uncanny. On Bluesky you wrote wrote that “Having a book come out that you made is pretty embarrassing tbh.” Am I getting warmer?
Ha, well that particular post was more about having to make such a spectacle of myself on social media and in interviews like this, I suppose. More than ever before publishing a book requires the author to put themselves out there and really market the book, something I’m just kind of shy about doing. On top of that, I’ve been self-publishing for over fifteen years, and am used to selling maybe 20 copies of a comic at a given convention and receiving almost no feedback, so receiving positive and negative early reviews on Goodreads has been a real roller coaster ride for both my ego and imposter syndrome.
But yeah, making art in general requires putting yourself out there in ways that can feel pretty exposed. Ultimately this is a piece of genre fiction, I’m not airing my laundry in the same way as a memoir or something, but still there are certainly people in my life who will read this book and be befuddled by it, and surprised that I might come up with such unpleasant ideas. But that’s also part of the fun of writing horror, for me.
I’m wondering if you feel comfortable talking about this, and we can skip this one if not, but do you have a day job? And if so, what is it? What do you gain from it (besides, you know, income). I ask because though it’s normal for working artists to have a job, no one acts as if it is, and I think it’s important to acknowledge it. From a critical point of view, the answer to this question is usually illuminating and fascinating, but I find artists are usually terrified to admit they still work. Full disclosure: despite having finally “made it” back in 2020 and deciding I could quit my day job and make enough money as a writer, the combined horror of covid and a renoviction kicked my ass back into working, and I now answer 911 calls when I’m not writing.
I do! I think more people should talk about this, I don’t get why people are so cagey about it. I have never suffered from the delusion that comics will be my full-time job. It could happen, but is extremely unlikely. Comics do not pay the bills, and even most successful cartoonists have day jobs. I do graphic design and copyediting for a marketing company that sells windows, actually. Part of me would love to just spend every day writing and drawing, but the stability is crucial. If I didn’t have a four year old daughter I might take this opportunity to roll the dice for a year or two and see whether I can make a go of doing this full-time, but that would be frankly idiotic and irresponsible with a child.
But boy oh boy do I wish I had more time! Also you’re a 911 dispatcher? Interesting!
I know both from your page notes and from following you on social media, that this book was several years in the making. What lessons have you learned from the process of making this collection of stories, and how will you apply it next time? As a writer-artist, can you talk about the unique challenges (and advantages) you have? Lastly, what’s next for you?
The book was made over the course of the last 6 years, though I certainly wasn’t working on it continuously. I self-published Little Visitor in 2019, then A Cordial Invitation was my COVID lockdown project which I self-published RIGHT as my daughter was born in 2021. What followed was an almost 2 and a half year gap where I didn’t draw a single page of comics, which is so hard to believe now. Frolicker was made after pitching the book to Oni, and here we are. I learned a huge amount making these stories, and they certainly led to my biggest leaps in skill and craft since I started making comics. I think, and hope, that I grew the most as a writer, though that’s up to readers to decide I guess.
As a writer-artist you have to wear a lot of hats and it can be difficult to execute every aspect of production to the level of quality you want from your work. But also it’s so freeing in other ways, and what results feels truly yours for better or worse.
As for what’s next for me, I have a 40ish page comic I’m working on for a tabletop RPG, but can’t say more right now. I have a ton of ideas I want to get to, and would love to do another collection of stories like this if there’s a hunger for it. I’ve also been dipping my toe into screenwriting, which has been a lot of fun. I’ve finished one feature script and am partway through another. I’d love to get back to writing some prose, as well, which I haven’t done since college. All I know for sure is I’m not going to let another 2 and a half years go by without working on comics!