‘Dwellings’ Exclusive: New Comic Is So Cute, It’s Scary

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This summer, Horror-comic-inspired-by-the-satanic-panic-coming-from-oni-press/”>Oni Press is excited to publish Jay Stephens‘ Dwellings, a bi-monthly limited series from the Emmy Award-winning animator and Eisner Award-nominated cartoonist. The publisher is reformatting Stephens’ acclaimed self-published series into three prestige-format chapters, showing off his disarmingly cute yet wholly disturbing style that lures you in with color and traps you with violence.

“As a young collector in the days before the internet, before our town even dreamt of a comic shop, I remember walking the train tracks on weekends, hunting back issues at garage sales and flea markets, picking up whatever I could find,” said Stephens. “Though considered uncool, I was magnetically attracted to the irresistibly adorable Harvey comics… Casper, Spooky, Wendy and Hot Stuff in particular… and always kept an eye out for that one issue where they finally revealed who murdered Casper the friendly Ghost. If the definition of nostalgia is to ‘return home in pain,’ Dwellings is the most nostalgic work I’ve ever produced. And my re-imagining of that darker Harvey Comics backstory has festered and intertwined with my personal fears into something truly frightening.”

In Dwellings:

Welcome to Elwich, an oasis of small-town perfection, where the schools overflow with cheery-eyed children, lovingly adorned homes line the historic boulevards… and only the crows can see the deep, festering rot that lurks beneath the pristine surface. Murder. Demonology. Possession. Obsession. Elwich has them all on offer—and behind every dwelling awaits a horrifying new story to be told.

Each of Dwellings’ three oversized, prestige format issues will be 72 blood-curdling pages long and will include two complete tales. The first issue, coming this August, includes the two stories “They Know” and “Second Tongue”. We have an exclusive excerpt from the story “They Know” about some rather intelligent crows.

Stephens told Dread Central exclusively,

In Dwellings‘ first tale, “They Know”, a secretive young man named John Allan finds his conscience tested by an increasingly larger murder of crows that follow him after a sudden, violent, incident. How and why are these birds attracted to him, and what do they know? Can John maintain a grip on his reality and identity? A Poe-meets-Hitchcock thriller, full of bloodthirsty birds, blending retro cuteness with classic small-town terror. Dwellings is a collection of psychological Horror tales, lovingly drawn in a vintage comics style to most perfectly invoke the half-remembered terrors of youth. The true meaning of the word nostalgia is, ‘to return home in pain’. So let’s get nostalgic, shall we?

Read the excerpt below:

See what I mean when it comes to that style?

Oni Press President & Publisher Hunter Gorinson sang the series praises, saying,

“Like Something Is Killing The Children force-fed through a woodchipper with a stack of old Harvey Comics and a half-empty bottle of absinthe, Dwellings is a nightmarish combination of pathological violence, nerve-fraying intensity, and Day-Glo suburban charm—all from the pen of a master cartoonist who has been building toward this series for the better part of two decades. Even if you’ve read tens of thousands of comics, I can guarantee this: You have never seen anything like Dwellings before..and aren’t like to again anytime soon.”

Dwellings comes to comic shops on August 9, 2024. The first issue will include all-new, never-before-seen standard and “bloody” edition covers by Jay Stephens himself, alongside brand-new variant covers by Joe Palmer (Time Before Time), Jenna Cha (Black Stars Above), and Brian Level (Batman Vs. Bigby! A Wolf In Gotham).