INTERVIEW: ‘Project: Cryptid’ creatives sound off on their favorite cryptids
Image courtesy of AHOY Comics / Provided by Superfan Promotions with permission.
Project: Cryptid, the successful series from AHOY Comics, has pumped out an enticing anthology filled with strange stories and weird tales about the cryptids of the world. Within these pages, cryptozoological enthusiasts should expect to read narratives steeped in local lore about debated species that may be knocking on the outside door. This is the land of Bigfoot, Mothman, lake monsters and Pooka.
Recently AHOY released the first trade paperback of the comic series. This particular compilation features stories of the Yeti, Frogman and Loch Ness Monster, oh my!
To better understand these cryptids and the creative team members bringing them to life, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Hanna Bahedry, Henry Barajas, Paul Constant, Paul Cornell, PJ Holden, Bryce Ingman, Maki Naro, Melissa F. Olson and Jordi Perez, who all had a hand to play in making Project: Cryptid. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
When did you first fall in love with cryptids?
Hanna Bahedry: When I heard that I would be getting paid to write about them. It was love at first paycheck!
Henry Barajas: My love started when my family tried to scare me with the Chupacabra legend. The Goat Sucker! The myth was like anything in Mexican culture and religion. Chupacabra was printed on anything and everything sold at the Swapmeet. That sent me on my path to wanting to discover what’s out there.
Paul Constant: I fell in love with them at the exact perfect time — when I was 4 or 5 and the whole world felt like a hallucination and everything was possible and all fiction was real. I think I learned about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster on the same day and immediately decided that I was going to go find them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my driver’s license at the time.
Paul Cornell: Reading scary paperbacks about the unknown as a small child and ruining my mind from that point.
PJ Holden: Like any child of the ’80s probably when I first saw Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, which promised a deeply strange world of crystal skulls, ancient pyramids, lake monsters and much more.
Bryce Ingman: As long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of monsters, especially misunderstood ones.
Maki Naro: While it wasn’t the first cryptid I had heard about, I first became aware of the wider field of cryptozoology when I was looking up Japanese ghosts and monsters, and among them was the Tsuchinoko. It looks like a snake, but with a body wider than its head and tail. The best part about it (aside from being a pathological liar) is that it moves around by biting its tail and rolling down hills, not unlike the hoop snake here in the U.S. It’s so goofy. And clearly some Japanese hiker saw a snake that had just eaten something and invented a new thing to be afraid of, but I love it nonetheless.
Melissa F. Olson: I never really thought of cryptids in terms of love, but I’ve definitely had a fondness for them since seeing Harry and the Hendersons with my sisters when I was a kid! As an adult I became an urban fantasy author, and a few years ago I spent a lot of time researching giant snake monsters for a book called Boundary Lines. It made me realize that cryptids are part of a story tradition that includes vampires and fairytales — they entertain us while simultaneously warning us about the dangers of being careless or disrespectful with things we don’t understand. I love that.
Jordi Perez: With the Harry and the Hendersons TV show.
What’s your favorite cryptid story, and why?
Hanna Bahedry: I had a very hard time picking a favorite, which is how my story ended up being an ensemble piece featuring a variety of cryptids gathering to discuss important cryptid business. Indecisiveness: If you can’t beat it, succumb to it! Also, after reading all the other stories in the collection, I have a newly acquired soft spot for the Loveland Frogman (as written by Bryce Ingman) and his sweet, daft face (as drawn by Peter Krause).
Henry Barajas: I hate to be biased, but my favorite is La Bete De Gevaudan. The layers of mystery and the fact that it was never actually caught makes it so compelling to me — aside from the murdered children and defenseless people of France, of course.
Paul Constant: I’m very fond of the mythology that’s built up around the West Virginia Mothman because it offers an opportunity to explore the deep poverty and environmental issues of that region.
Paul Cornell: I love the Mongolian Deathworm. You should love your Mongolian Deathworm, but not love. I just think they’re such a weird combo of attributes, a big worm with lightning.
PJ Holden: Gotta be Bigfoot. A whole new species of something that might be human? Yes, please.
Bryce Ingman: The earliest account of the Loveland Frogmen captivates me. A traveling salesman, at night, driving alone on a dark country road sees sparks of light on the road ahead of him. He soon encounters a group of 4-foot tall humanoid frogmen holding sticks above their heads. The sticks are emitting sparks as the frogmen somehow use them to harness electricity. The account ends there, so I’m guessing he didn’t pull over and say, “Hi.” He should have!
Melissa F. Olson: I’m currently obsessed with the movie Trollhunters, which I recently saw for the first time. I live in a small town in Wisconsin that was settled by Scandinavians, and we have troll statues all over town. I give them a wide berth when I’m running errands now.
Jordi Perez: The Mothman — an omen that something mysterious is going to happen.
Do you have a local cryptid myth near where you live or where you grew up?
Hanna Bahedry: I grew up in Los Angeles, where there is far too much traffic and too many paparazzi for any cryptid to survive unscathed and unphotographed. (Though Eric Palicki and Wendell Cavalcanti’s comic Black Myth has me reconsidering this. Would love to run into the Minotaur in the wilds of Hollywood and buy him a martini or three at Musso and Frank.)
Henry Barajas: La Llorona goes back to the 1500s, but the regional version was that she was drowned by the Rio Grande. The elders would try to scare us kids from going outside to play when it’s late at night and go as far as having someone moan “¿Donde mi hijos?” If there’s a volume two, I would love to tell that story.
Paul Constant: The story that I wrote in Project: Cryptid Volume 1 is about a cryptid who’s local to my adopted home of the Pacific Northwest! It’s called a Gumberoo, and it looks like a smiling, naked bear. The Gumberoo tormented local loggers, and they were known to explode when exposed to fire. It’s a lesser-known cryptid, but a fun one.
Paul Cornell: There are some local alien big cats, but nothing big enough to fill a lake.
PJ Holden: I’m in Ireland, so, of course, everywhere you turn there’s legends of fairy folk. But I’m not sure if they classify as cryptids. That said, there is a creature that comes into my house at night, opens and eats tins of tuna, dozens of eggs, bananas and whatever food it can find and then leaves the detritus behind — like a crime scene where the only victim is food. Something monosyllabic, shambling and covered in a monstrous shock of hair. But I’m fairly certain that’s my 19-year-old son.
Bryce Ingman: I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It’s a heavily forested region with many Bigfoot sightings. As a youngster on family trips, traveling by car through the tree-lined highways of Oregon, I imagined Bigfoots were watching us from behind every tree. I always kept my eyes peeled for them, but alas, I never glimpsed one.
Melissa F. Olson: I grew up in northern Wisconsin, where all school kids hear the tall tales about lumberjacks and Paul Bunyan and the fearsome critters in the Northwoods. It was so fun to write a story for Project: Cryptid about one of these critters, the hodag. When I was in high school our sports teams played against the Rhinelander Hodags!
Jordi Perez: Yes, the Santa Compaña! It’s a legendary ghostly procession in Galician folklore, symbolizing spirits in purgatory and reflecting the region’s blend of pre-Christian and Christian beliefs.
How was the experience working on Project: Cryptid?
Hanna Bahedry: I’ve worked with AHOY for years as part of the publicity team, as well as writing their newsletter, some short stories for their backmatter, and a chapter of their prose serial “Partially Naked Came the Corpse!” — but this was the first comic I’d ever written, so I was suitably daunted. But I knew I was in great hands with the wonderfully encouraging folks at AHOY and especially editor Sarah Litt, who believed in me when she had no reasonable evidence to do so. Which, as I understand it, actually makes me a cryptid, so look out for a story about me in Volume 2.
Henry Barajas: It was a great challenge to try to give a reader an entire horror meal in 10 pages. Thankfully, I’ve done enough short stories to know when to hit the gas and leave you wanting more. I love operating in a grey area and giving my perspective on something everyone and their grandmother has their version of the story.
Paul Constant: It was an absolute dream, from conception to publication. The editor, Sarah Star Litt, was super-supportive and encouraging of the pitch for my little wilderness gothic tale. She connected me with Peter Krause, who is an artist I have admired since I was a kid buying his Power of Shazam series from the local drugstore. Peter was exactly as smart, talented and pleasant as you’d hope one of your all-time favorite artists would be, and colorist Pippa Bowland and letterer Rob Steen skillfully handled some very particular, some might say fussy, requests to bring out the story’s nuances. Like all good comics, it was a team effort where everyone did their very best work and produced something even better than the sum of their parts.
Paul Cornell: An emotional rollercoaster of skilled editorial insight. Actually, P.J. Holden really did such a great job, a set of roughs that immediately got every detail right.
PJ Holden: Well, it was enormous fun, but that’s the joy of AHOY. It’s silly and fun all the way.
Bryce Ingman: Fun, fun, fun!
Maki Naro: I was so excited when I got the email from Mattie to draw their Bigfoot influencer story. We had been friends and worked alongside each other at The Nib for years in an editor/contributor capacity, but we had never teamed up on a project before. Mattie has such a fun sense of humor and a storytelling style that you can feel on every page. It was such a joy to be able to bring their story to life. My fingers are crossed that we are someday blessed with a Hefty Jake cinematic universe.
Melissa F. Olson: It was so friendly and welcoming! I’m really impressed with the way AHOY has included a mixture of established comic book creators and people like me, who came into comics from another medium. Increasing the variety of tales and voices sends a more powerful message about how universal cryptid stories are. It’s great to be connected to that.
Jordi Perez: Both the story and the relationship with the people involved were wonderful. It would be a pleasure to repeat it again.
Do you believe in Bigfoot? Loch Ness Monster? Jersey Devil? Loveland Frogman?
Hanna Bahedry: The world is full of things I don’t comprehend — love, composting, the fact that they’ve rebooted seemingly every sitcom from the ’80s except for the highly deserving Who’s the Boss? — so cryptids seem about as likely as anything.
Henry Barajas: I want to believe. Otherwise, life is too fucking boring.
Paul Constant: After reading the excellent Loveland Frogman story in this volume, also drawn by Peter and written by Bryce Ingman, I now believe that the Loveland Frogman is 100% real, and I’m a devoted fan of that goofy li’l guy.
Paul Cornell: I don’t think Nessie is possible. The Jersey Devil is clearly a conflation of many different stories, and a lot of U.S. cryptids are a product of early newspaper tall tale contests. I have some time for Bigfoot, albeit not in all its permutations, because there’s not anything inherently impossible about it. I think the Yeti, however, is an unrecognized species of bear that wanders higher upslope than others. There’s an ancient monastery text that just says outright that the Yeti is ‘a kind of bear.’ Yeah, I was perhaps the ideal writer for this project.
PJ Holden: I’m largely skeptical of anything too fantastic (especially since it often mostly reflects things we’re interested in), but also deeply aware that giant squids were nothing but a fable until they filmed them. But, of course, they were far more interesting as cryptids than as just very, very big squid.
Bryce Ingman: I’m still looking for a Bigfoot. I’ll get back to you on this question when I finally spot one.
Maki Naro: Cue The X Files theme because I want to believe! But I’m not holding my breath. Hefty Jake is real though. My camp counselor saw him at Stew Leonard’s once.
Melissa F. Olson: No, but I think of them the same way I think of ghosts — I don’t necessarily believe, but you won’t catch me running around a cemetery or forest late at night either. I guess I’m a cryptid agnostic.
Jordi Perez: Yes, I think there is something atavistic and mysterious that shows itself to us as cryptids regardless of their form.
What is it about cryptids that make them so perfect for comics and storytelling?
Hanna Bahedry: Human beings are always trying to fill in the edges of our understanding with things that we can make sense of; a cryptid by its very definition is a story we’ve told ourselves about something unknowable in order to assuage our deep primal fear of life’s ultimately incomprehensible mystery. Also they’re hairy and scaly and have wings and feathers and stuff, and that makes them incredibly sick to draw.
Henry Barajas: The medium can hold suspense in a way others can’t. The marriage of words and pictures making you imagine something that’s happening between the panels is unrivaled.
Paul Constant: Comics are the ideal medium to showcase cryptids! In prose, like in Molly Gloss’ sexy Bigfoot novel Wild Life, they always feel a little too ephemeral and vague. In film, like in Antlers, they tend to look a little cheap and small. But in comics, cryptids can be a bare suggestion or a full-on horrific monster attack, and the medium is flexible enough to easily handle every variation of the experience. If you have any doubt about that, this volume of Project: Cryptid is all the proof you need. In this book, these weird creatures live and breathe. Heck, if you flip through the book fast enough, you can practically smell them.
Paul Cornell: They are recognizable IP that belong only to nature and the world!
PJ Holden: You can pretty much tell stories of the mundane and the fantastic all in one go. And who doesn’t love a monster-of-the-week thrill?
Bryce Ingman: They’re perfect for all kinds of tales, particularly ones about embracing differences and avoiding judging people based on perceived differences. There’s a lot of potential for humor with cryptids, too. I absolutely love writing cryptid stories!
Maki Naro: I think because of the lack of solid photographic evidence (don’t @ me!), cryptids capture the imagination more than regular animals. Every artist is going to adapt these oral histories differently, much in the same way as every story of the Mothman has slightly different embellishments. It also dovetails perfectly with traditional comics’ role in our culture as a modern-day visual mythology. I think I might have stolen that bit from M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, though.
Melissa F. Olson: More than anything, I think it’s the art. Obviously I’m big on writing, but getting professional artists like Lane Lloyd and PJ Holden drawing cryptids is like having a police sketch of a suspect. It makes everything feel more scary and possible.
Jordi Perez: It is a window to fantasy and adventures with enormous possibilities.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on the Project: Cryptid Volume 1 trade paperback.
