Back in July 2023, we met up with Scott Snyder to talk about Dark Spaces, his “universe” of grounded horror/crime stories that he’d begun telling at IDW alongside a gaggle of extra talented collaborators. At the time, Snyder spoke in-depth about his own work (with artist Hayden Sherman) on Dark Spaces: Wildfire as well as Dark Spaces: Good Deeds (from Che Grayson and Kelsey Ramsay) and Dark Spaces: Hollywood Special (from Jeremy Lambert and Claire Roe). This was a true bevy of of great new stories, all working toward building a rich library of daring new approaches to horror. Turns out, though, all but one story was discussed, and it may be the scariest of them all: Dark Spaces: Dungeon.
Debuting back in October 2023, the title (another Snyder-Sherman collabo) follows a federal agent, Bodhi Madoc, as he joins forces with a father, Tyler Letts, to uncover the twisted machinations of a serial killer who locks his victims in twisted “dungeons” dotted across the U.S. With issue #4 (out of five) dropping next week (March 13), we thought it was time to reconnect with Snyder to discuss his latest tale from the dark side.
(Editor’s Note: Minor spoilers ahead for Dungeon #4).
Given that it’s the fourth Dark Spaces book to debut, it’s probably savvy to start with Dungeon‘s reception thus far. Yet as Snyder told us, that’s often a tricky prospect.
“I don’t have an expectation usually going in, especially the last four years,” said Snyder. “I’ve had this incredible creative walkabout where I’ve been really lucky to have these partners like IDW and Dark Horse and ComiXology and Image [Comics] who were willing to let me and my co-creators just try things that push us out of our comfort zones. And so IDW [editorial director] Mark Doyle have been great about saying, ‘Just try something that you wouldn’t do elsewhere.'”
It’s especially complicated because, as he’s said before, Dark Spaces is about something totally new from Snyder, and he operates on a strict edict of “no monsters, no spec, no sci-fi, no nothing that breaks the rules of everyday reality now.” It’s not what he’s used to across several levels, and that shock to the system helps with creative stagnation.
“It’s just a really unfamiliar experience,” he said. “It’s doing something that you haven’t done before, and so there’s no expectation. If I go back and I do Batman, I know what the expectation is. You know what it should probably sell or hopefully the zone. I know what the reception I’m hoping for is in some regard. I know the fanbase.”
That fanbase element really matters. While Batman fans may have clear expectations, it seems true blue Snyder fans are a tad more open-ended.
“The fans just show up to see you try new things, which has been a real joy,” Snyder said. “And the reception has been way better. Not that I thought it would be bad, but I guess it’s just been really uplifting to see. Hayden sends me things. And I do look online. I’m just very excited to see it being so well received mostly because we’re having such a good time making it and it’s a very dark book. It’s one of those ones where you’re like, ‘Are people really going to hate me for this one? I never thought that people would show up for the books to the degree that they have.”
Courtesy of IDW.
Snyder admits that he’s been “embarrassingly lucky” with the reaction, and yet he doesn’t want to merely accept any praise. That reaction, he explained, has pushed him to never “play it safe.” While horror is “part of [his] DNA” thanks to books like Wytches, Night of the Ghoul, and American Vampire, Snyder thinks Dungeon is another beast entirely.
“So with this, it really was about saying, ‘OK, my favorite serial killer horror is Alex Cross, Clarice Starling…serial killer hunting agent; I love those stories,” said Snyder. “Then I want to push it somewhere I haven’t seen it go. And so both intellectually, it’s about a serial killer that thinks of himself, for better or worse, or for right or wrong, as something different than what’s come before and is more representative of what he thinks the zeitgeist is. My favorite kinds of those stories usually skew very dark, like Se7en and Silence of the Lambs. They go to a place that is poignant, and so it earns that darkness. They take you to someplace that really unsettles you in the back half especially.”
He added, “Something like Stephen King’s The Stand…those very easily accessible stories that then take you somewhere really moving. I like experimenting and I like challenging myself to do things, but that also make me feel excited or creatively daunted.”
The difference between those other books, like Night of the Ghoul for instance, is the “high concept” and the “1940s glamour, Universal horror movies feel”, according to Snyder.” But Dungeon is “so quiet, disturbing, and emotionally gruesome,” and it’s about going the distance in every step of the way.
“Book of Evil and [Dungeon] are probably the darkest that I’ve done in a while,” said Snyder. “There’s this illusion of darkness with something like Nocterra, but Nocterra is a very hopeful book.” With Dungeon, he said that “there’s also a conscious decision to move away from some techniques that comfort you. Like, there’s no narration, for example. There’s a lot of quiet space. There’s a lot of distant shots.”
To some extent, Snyder’s boundary-pushing has some “helpers,” as it were. For one, he sees the great work of other comics-writing friends, and how they’re tapping into something essential about the medium, to do truly innovative things.
“If you look at, for example, James Tynion [IV]’s work right now, or Ram V with some of his horror stuff…where you use the medium in a way that creates the sense of dread,” said Snyder. “I think comics is really good at that: creating a sense of anxiety and dread because it has the strengths of fiction, like prose fiction, in that you’re actively turning the pages as you wish, making the things up off the panel.”
He added, “Yet you’re giving [readers] these prompts that push them into a zone they might not have wanted. So it has this great combination of strengths for horror in particular, or even thrillers. But you can also mitigate those by using certain craft elements that are more inclusive, like narration and close-ups. It’s creating a texture and a tone that makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t know what. All of those things are in Dungeon…trying to do that on a formal level and trying to employ things that I don’t normally do because they’re right for the story, even if they put me a little bit outside my normal lane. For people like James, that’s the normal lane. And I love his stuff for that reason. It’s always unsettling.”
Art from issue #1. Courtesy of IDW.
More directly, though, it’s his work with Sherman, one of several bright up-and-comers in the Dark Spaces “universe,” that’s been just as responsible for the important work of this ongoing series of stories.
“Hayden and I will have a long talk before the series, and then we’ll have a talk usually before each issue or so,” said Snyder. “I’ll walk them through my thoughts about the arc of the issue, the tenor of it, and the theme of it. So there’s a sense of shape. On a series level we say, ‘We want this series to feel more and more paranoid and claustrophobic, issue to issue. We want to go from wide open spaces, like where you feel like you should not feel trapped, to feeling absolutely claustrophobically trapped inside of panels and tight spaces.”
Snyder added, “The important beats on the page where I’ll say like, “Page one: Tyler is jogging, it’s fall. As he jogs, he gets a phone call.’ This should feel open and beautiful and nothing paranoid at all. So then Hayden will come back with these beautiful layouts and spreads of Tyler running, and sometimes it’ll be something I never expected, like an overhead shot or a close-up. But I let them completely make those directorial decisions. It’s about getting out of their way and just trying to give them the things they need to feel energized…the emotionality, the thematics, the tonality of it.”
Because at the end of the day, be it massive superheroes versus grounded characters, Snyder wants to tell specific kinds of stories about the human experience.
“I love characters like him [Bodhi],” said Snyder. “There’s characters like this in Wytches and in other things that I write, where I am really fascinated by people who are just so passionate about something that they’re self-destructive in all other ways. And for Bodhi, he’s destroying his own career as the book goes on, and he has no life outside of this case up to that point anyway. But he’s doing it because he is so desperate to catch this guy, and because he doesn’t want what happened to him to happen to someone else. Yet it’s happening to him in a figurative way, and then pretty literally.”
Snyder went further still with the idea. At one point, I made a reference to Bodhi being not unlike Batman, and that got Snyder focused on ideas of obsession and a character’s drive.
“I think one of the things that’s interesting to me about what you just said is that Batman is a healthy version of it because he exists in a different genre,” said Snyder. “At least how I write Batman, I’m not as interested necessarily in his obsession, except maybe with Death of the Family, but that was more about parenthood. I’m not hugely interested in his obsession being something that’s negative. I’m more interested in the way in which he is this machine that turns trauma into fuel. And I think the power of Batman, and the reason he’s so enduring and the reason he’s so adaptable at its core…it’s a very basic concept. I love Lego Batman (that’s my favorite) to Robert Pattinson to whatever else exists. That concept is you take the bad things that happen to you and you turn them into this fire to get up and change things for the better. And if you make Batman that, it’s this perpetual kind of winning machine that gets up and says, ‘I will always get up. It doesn’t matter what you send to me. I’m always gonna get back up.'”
He added, “Spider-Man is similar, but Spider-Man tells you that. Batman is more just by the force of will that he does it. And it’s interesting to me that in the real world, that would be intensely unhealthy, you know?”
At the end of the day, all of it boils down to less about pomp and circumstance or edginess or even sick rides but what these characters really exemplify for Snyder.
“I’m not interested in how the Batmobile gets around, or how nobody ever stops it at a red light or whatever,” he said. “I’m more interested in the things [Bodhi] faces being the extensions of my fears or the things in the world and how I’m going to have him be brave and overcome those things in the face of the challenges they pose.”
Art from issue #2. Courtesy of IDW.
There’s an important thread in that last comment: all of Dark Spaces is very much a vehicle for Snyder’s own fears and concerns.
“When I did Wildfire, I wanted to do a noir-like heist, but I wanted to make it something that feels like it’s about this moment,” he said. “What are the things that caught your eye recently that felt like they were so particular to this moment when things are stratified by class and divisive and feel entropic and the end of the world? Well, I saw this news story about this book, Breathing Fire, about women who were incarcerated in California, but then come out to fight wildfires as part of a prison program, and usually wind up protecting houses that are extremely expensive for a few dollars a day. And that felt very resonant as something that was a situation that was particular at this moment, but also would lend itself to a great story about what if one of them knew there was something in one of those houses they could steal and maybe finally make it out of this rough existence.”
When it came time for Dungeon, then, he wondered how he could “make all of it feel hyper-urgent, hyper-modern, and relevant for this moment?” Why how about “Tyler is working with this algorithmic facial recognition, and [that’s] the way that this killer traps you.” It goes deeper still, as technology is just the latest way that fear can follow you home.
“The fears expressed in the book are very much fears that I have for my kids and about my kids,” Snyder said. “When I grew up, the big fear was that there were serial killers in the ’70s and ’80s. It was this isolation and this feeling of anonymity and this desire for a visceral thrill kill. And now it feels very overconnected. It’s more that you’re afraid your kid’s going to get manipulated or controlled or taken advantage of. That someone’s going to find them online and trick them.”
He added, “There’s all of this subterfuge and lack of truth. So if somebody could control that, or have you under their thumb, what’s a bigger thrill now than the captivity of having someone’s whole life that you own? So the point is, when everything feels less and less in your control, and where everything feels more and more overwhelmingly uncertain, how terrifying is it to have someone that just is in full control of you? It feels kind of like the opposite end of that barbell, you know? That’s what the Dark Spaces series is about: trying to do genre in a way that brings in things in the zeitgeist for me that make them resonate, elevate the genre a bit, and make it even more unsettling.”
It’s not just Dungeon, either. Snyder admitted that a lot of his work reflects his current mental status and all-around obsessions and concerns.
“The skeleton key of my approach is always that you could track what I’m going through in my personal life through the books,” he said. “When we were having our second kid maybe 10-plus years ago, I was terrified of being a father again and worried about them having a bad dad in me and just worried about me being too selfish. So, Wytches and Death of the Family, all those are expressions of that pretty openly but from different angles. Now I think I’m very much worried about the world they’re facing, and the sort of strangeness of this landscape on all fronts — social, cultural, political, technological, economic, everything.”
Issue #4 has an especially powerful moment. Not only one where Bodhi must put on a brave face (as Snyder touched on earlier), but also how that reflects his own feelings with parenting, interpersonal connections, and living in this uneven, often dark world that we call home.
“Issue #4 has one of my favorite moments I’ve written in a while,” said Snyder. “And I think it works. I hope it does. He tells this whole story and it winds up actually providing the clue in a way. It makes Tyler think of something that causes him to realize how to see this evidence differently. But it’s my favorite part of the series because it’s just what you said: the point of the scene isn’t just that he’s opening up, but he’s saying, ‘I made it through and I’m going to be OK. And your son’s going to be OK.'”
Art from issue #3. Courtesy of IDW.
We’ll let Snyder tell the whole extended anecdote:
“It’s definitely a left turn of a scene. But they’re sitting together and they’re looking at all of this evidence. Earlier in the issue, Tyler, to pass the time, said to [Bodhi], ‘Take my mind off what’s going on. Tell me about your pet.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t have a pet.’ Tyler goes, ‘You look like somebody that would own a pet. I stare at faces in these algorithmic photo decks all day long, and I’ve gotten really good at guessing what kind of people have pets.’ Then, later in the issue, they’re sitting alone and at this diner with this evidence and they don’t know how to figure out. And Bodhi is like, ‘Finn. I had pet before I was taken into the dungeon. And it was this bird, this cockatoo.’ Then he goes, ‘I was really into birds with my dad, we would go birding.’ (It’s true about these birds that they’re called velcro birds because they get very attached apparently.) Then Bodhi goes, ‘I would leave the house, and it would scream all day. My father actually sound-proofed my room because they couldn’t listen to this cockatoo. And then I would come home and it would be so happy to see me that it would bite me.'”
He added, “The bird plays a big part in the fifth issue, too. Then you’ll notice it the background, there’s things with birds throughout.”
The other thing you may have noticed regarding Dungeon is that it’s one of few Snyder-penned comics titles on shelves these days. After years of a rather prolific release schedule, he’s been working on other projects, including co-writing the forthcoming TV adaptation of Wytches.
“I never expected to enjoy working in TV or film or any of that very much,” said Snyder. “And then animation…I’ve fallen in love with it. I really love it because it’s full of really creative people that are all geeky in their own way and really interested in pushing the envelopes visually and story-wise and it’s a lane that I feel like right now is about to explode. Especially where you see the success of things like Invincible and Blue Eye Samurai and Spider-Verse. I think the message is that there’ve always been really sophisticated animated movies and Pixar and all that, but it’s time for animated television and other things that’s for adults. They’ve been raised on Pixar and anime and all this stuff that’s sophisticated but is very stylized as opposed to doing straight ahead horror and straight ahead drama.”
Whereas comics is about an “intensely intimate” collaboration with someone like Sherman, TV writing is all about a different kind of collaboration.
“IDW is amazing, and there’s no oversight. But with Amazon, there’s oversight,” said Snyder.
It’s a balancing act that Snyder has been aware of for quite some time, and he recognizes that as he moves deeper into a long and prosperous career, he needs differing kinds of structures and projects to really flourish.
“It’s almost like when I was working on superhero comics, I always had to have indie comics or I would start to go really crazy. I started to get pretty depressed,” he said. “The only time I’ve ever been really teetering on a really bad place, I think, in superhero comics was when I gave up American Vampire for a while, and really all my indie stuff, to just do Batman and Superman Unchained. I adore writing superheroes, but I can’t only do that or I start to get extremely anxious about it because I feel like there’s no place I can go where I know I alone am, right? To not have a place that you go — that’s just you and maybe one other collaborator, where you’re just making something like a treehouse where nobody can tell you what’s right and wrong, this totally unfettered blank canvas — is very, very hard. If I didn’t have a book like Dungeon while I was doing the Wytches [TV] stuff, I feel like I’d go crazy. I’d go to a very dark place with it because I just feel so constrained.”
Courtesy of IDW.
He added, “And so the comfort zone for me is that I love one place where it’s rigid. I like the box of, ‘How do you renew Batman?’ How do you make something that you feel is personal and you haven’t seen — those challenges that really are like a Rubik’s cube. And then I always love having one space where I can do the experimental thing. That’s why indie stuff works well, too. I feel like there’s a lot of different collaboration, and a lot of partners. But I’m ready for a more binary system, I think. I like this system of comics or TV or whatever that’s constrained and has rules that you’re working within to make something surprising. Then one place that’s totally completely unrestricted.”
So that’s primarily why Dungeon is such an important and vital book for Snyder. Yet it’s more than just his “lifeline” to comics. Dungeon balances old fears and new anxieties into a powerful concoction. It scrambles the brain and heart alike with intense visuals undercut by deep emotional exploration. It pushes and pulls readers with brutal efficiency and force. It takes horror and tries to make it something that unnerves not for its own sick pleasure, but to get you to consider why you’re terrified in the first place — and maybe what you can do about that (if anything).
Ultimately, it’s a story decidedly close to Snyder’s heart, a powerful continuation of his horror comics roots, and something both innovative and wholly familiar at a time when that feels especially vital. Just don’t think that means that, as we get closer and closer to the ending, that Snyder and company will let up on the intensity one bit.
“I’m always trying to be honest about my books and be very transparent. I’ll say, ‘This is a brighter one, or this is a darker one.’ This one is pitch black,” he said. “I don’t want to ruin anything, but it’s very unrelenting. It’s a merciless kind of book, and so it keeps going. If you’re enjoying that element of it, you’ll love where it goes. If you are not, or it’s making you dizzy, then you should stop because it doesn’t get better.”
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