Patrick Horvath’s six-issue series Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees was a hit in comics shops following its release last year and was released this month by IDW in a collected trade paperback that marks Horvath’s first book publication. It follows a cuddly-looking brown bear who moonlights as a serial killer—and finds herself tracking down a rival murderer threatening to expose her secret. PW’s review called it “deceptively cute horror” and a “hairy twist on the slasher genre.” Horvath will be in Artist Alley during all four days of New York Comic Con. PW caught up with him at San Diego Comic-Con to talk about his graphic novel debut, the hunger for “cozy horror,” and more.
They say comics aren’t for kids, but this one has a very classic picture book look. It’s in this kind of emerging, rising picture book comics horror genre.
I’ve also heard the term “cozy horror,” which I find really amusing. It’s definitely for mature readers. It basically follows the goings-on in a small town of animal people. There’s a bear who owns the hardware store. Her name is Samantha. She also happens to be a serial killer, and she’s been thriving for the past couple of decades because she’s smart about it. She does all of her killing in the city nearby, where people don’t notice somebody disappearing. She’s been doing this for a long time. But unfortunately, there’s another sociopath who shows up in town killing people, doing it very messily and drawing a lot of unwanted attention. Our story follows Samantha the bear as she tries to figure out who among the other cute animal folks is the other killer.
The limited series has a number of variant covers. How did you connect with the artists who worked on them?
A lot of the artists that did the variants are just awesome artists that, honestly, I’ve never met, like Jae Lee. We’ve done a variant with Tony Fleecs, the writer behind the Feral and Stray Dogs series. As far as I understand the process, retailers will pick an artist and put together a pitch for what the cover art would be, then get it approved by IDW. If it gets approved, they have to do a buy-in for a certain amount, and once those are produced, they can sell them.
It’s my first book, so I didn’t even know what these variant covers were, to be honest! The whole year has been educational for me. I initially pitched this as a graphic novel in five chapters, and my editor was like, “So, these issue breaks are great! We can make it six and it would be terrific as singles.”
Did you feel inspired by that extra issue? Did it give you something in the story?
Most definitely. As we mentioned, it looks like a very cute premise from the outset, then obviously it’s about a serial killer, so it gets very disturbing. But there’s also an upsetting ingredient to it that I really enjoyed bringing to it, that allows characters to deal with sadness and grief. There’s a whole issue that centered on that, which I was really grateful to create. It would not have been there in its entirety, and it wouldn’t have been as strong, if I hadn’t been given that opportunity. The violence is really grounded, even though it’s very cute. I think that’s part of the jarring juxtaposition that works really well with readers. There’s consequences, and you feel those consequences in the community.
What do you think it says about our culture that there’s this desire for “cozy horror”?
I think it dovetails super well with the true crime audience that exploded in the ’90s. A lot of the initial readers, it felt like, were older—20s, 30s, 40s. I’m in my 40s, I basically made it for me. And the folks that are my age enjoy it a lot—anybody that came of age in the ’80s, it would probably speak to really strongly. But if you go younger, there’s a whole other audience of these kids finding the book now from the manga scene, and they’re into it.
