Death as a form of living: Zac Thompson talks ‘Cemetery Kids,’ ‘Into the Unbeing,’ and more

I have this theory — let’s call it the “Dead Dad Transmogrification Premise.”

Admittedly, the name’s needlessly, dramatically macabre, but it’s a well-meaning observation on pain or discomfort “inspiring” creative development. It happened, as you can guess, when my own father died in December 2022. When the crying and shock wore off, I had to come back to life and work and not just sitting awkwardly in bathtubs. And through that process of rebuilding, I found myself more creatively focused and capable than ever before. Ideas maybe didn’t explode outward, but I knew what I wanted to say with a clarity and depth heretofore unknown.

If it helps, the equation is “Distress + Art X Time = New Creative License.” (Or whatever, my dad dying didn’t make me a genius at pseudo-math.)

Without realizing it (and with nary to do with his own father/family life), Zac Thompson exemplifies the transmogrification.

“I feel good with [the recent] run of books, and I feel like I’ve definitely hit my stride creatively,” Thompson said in a Zoom chat mid-July. “After having that run, and after looking at it and being really happy with everything that had come out basically since the pandemic onward, I took a step back last year and shifted gears a little bit so I could only work on like one or two things at a time.”

In some ways, it’s almost an artistic rebirth for the Canadian writer.

“It reminded me of what it was like to create comics back when I first started, which was that I got to spend years just fine-tuning things,” Thompson said. “And I really, really love that. Obviously you can’t do that if comics is your full-time job. So I made a decision last year to go and pursue the world of film at the same time as working in comics. That way I get to have my foot in both worlds I love, but I’m not letting either one absorb me.”

It’s also given him a chance to better understand the things that interests him creatively, and what all of that means in terms of storytelling.

“I am who I am,” Thompson said. “I have these things that I’m deeply fascinated in that I can’t stop picking at or thinking about. How we use technology and how technology uses us. I think there’s a lot of duality in my work. The idea of pain and pleasure being equal, but opposite. The digital self and the real self being equal and opposite.”

Through all of this growth and self-evaluation, Thompson has released some of his finest work. The miniseries Blow Away, for instance, is among my most enjoyed crime stories of the last few years. It sees Thompson at the peak of his form as this deeply human, endlessly thoughtful storyteller who connects the personal with the universal in a way that tells us about who we are, our place in the world, and who we’re becoming (whether we like it or not).

But Blow Away is a mere drop in the pond, and there’s three other titles/projects from Thompson over the last year or so that really speak to his prowess and skill. Books that see him transmogrified into a writer of another breed entirely.

Into The Abyss

Of course, you have to begin that larger conversation with Into the Unbeing.

A collaboration with the equally-talented Hayden Sherman, Into the Unbeing follows a team of scientists/researchers in the near future as they explore an “impossible landform” (that turns out to be more familiar and human than they’d ever expected). Across both parts one and two, it’s been a chance for Thompson to delve into a topic that’s become his niche — and something that more comics creators frankly need to tackle these days.

“I think, realistically, living in Vancouver in the 2020s when the city was basically on fire every single summer, it radicalized me in a way where I wasn’t really prepared for it. I just started to think about climate change,” Thompson said. “I started to think about my role in the work I was creating. I started to look at the space in comics and I thought, ‘This is interesting. No one’s talking about this in a real way.’ Every time I think I’m doing something new, I look at it and I’m like, ‘Here I am again.’ At the end of the day, it’s just indisputably the different facets of my personality that I can trick publishers into financing and releasing as comics.”

Into the Unbeing isn’t just resonant because, for instance, our four explorers live in a world on the verge of total climate collapse. Or, that during their journey into the landform, they encounter others who have grappled with a changing world (like the one explorer who entered circa the Industrial Revolution). No, it’s that Thompson uses the story to teach a valuable lesson about climate change and not simply rub our face in our own mess.

“Part of the reason that that book is written in first person plural is I want to have that happen over and over and over again for the reader – to reinforce the idea that we see this thing as an individualistic transformation. And the reality is it’s very collectivist,” Thompson said. “It’s a collectivist approach that is actually going to create some revolution and change. And we are an individualistic culture, and storytelling by and large in a Western tradition is very individual-based; it’s always about a person who goes on a journey and changes.”

Thompson added, “So that book was structured in a way to have a reader go through something over and over again and watch people come to different conclusions about what they’re going through and then, in the back end, loop it all around and go, ‘Well, now the main character’s consciousness is holding this collective in their skull. Which I think is how you have to live – you have to live with a community behind you in order to approach systemic change anyway.”

It’s not about coddling or debasing our species (even if we clearly deserve the latter). No, it’s about reminding us that if it’s indeed not to late to change, that process will still very much suck out loud.

“You have to be really uncomfortable,” Thompson said. “If you insert yourself into a new community, you’re going to be uncomfortable that first night that you show up and you’re standing on the edge of a room and you’re wondering how to integrate yourself within the group.”

Even Thompson initially tried to look on the bright side. But that’s no good with the very fate of the world in play.

“I actually had a really hard time with the ending of the book…it was really optimistic, actually,” Thompson said. “I reread it and I was like, ‘Oh my God, like this is not a horror book anymore.’ And so I had to go back to it and look at it and go, ‘OK, well, how do we get some optimism, but also the other side of it where things are fucked and you have that hard pill to swallow of, ‘You have to live in that.’”

Thompson added, “The reality is, climate change and it’s all-consuming power will affect people and will physically change their material existence and they are going to have to decide whether or not they want to do something about it or whether or not they just carry on and pretend like nothing’s going on. I think both options are deeply uncomfortable, but doing the hard work is really difficult. Again, getting into the duality of something can be beautiful and also very scary and dangerous at the same time.”

Hope With a Caveat

It wasn’t that Thompson didn’t have ideas or solutions to offer. (Anyone with half a brain and access to Google could figure out something.) Rather, there’s no power or significance in merely handing out lessons as people face this massive existential crisis.

“I’m of the school of thought where a good story should just basically ask you really interesting questions and leave you with the tools to find the answers on your own terms rather than being didactic and [saying], ‘You got to get out there,'” Thompson said. “Sometimes identifying a problem is more important than actually presenting a solution because when we’re immersed in things, it’s sometimes hard to actually see the problem, right?”

Thompson added, “It’s hard to actually identify what’s going on. I just think it’s disingenuous when you’re like, ‘Here’s the one thing…this piece of art is going to change the world.’ I think that’s naive. You can definitely go through an emotional journey with a character that you may not have empathized with and then start to think about the world differently. But I think anything that presents itself as a solution is probably trying to sell you something.”

At this point, I asked if he minded being the “climate change comics guy.” He doesn’t, actually, and he’s more than happy to “fall on that sword.” If anything, he’s just happy that people are reading the damn books in the first place.

“For a long time, I was really struggling to get anyone to bite on climate change stuff,” Thompson said. “And now it seems like what people actually want from me is more stuff in that space. I’m fine to keep depressing people. If you look at the work of Jeff Vandermeer, he’s been writing about the environment since the very beginning and never runs out of interesting things to say or interesting stories or weird lenses to look at things. I think at the end of the day, I do look at this stuff as, if you have this cool vehicle, you can trick people into thinking about climate change in a way…”

Because, as Thompson readily understands, we don’t live in a world where climate fiction sits atop everyone’s reading pile. Because books like Into the Unbeing may be popular, but they’ll never live up to some other global faves.

“We live in a world where the most popular thing is Chainsaw Man,” Thompson said. “He’s got chainsaws for arms and a chainsaw for head. I was talking to my 11-year-old nephew about it yesterday, and he just loves it. He only loves it because he looks cool. But at the end of the day, that can get people in the door and have them start to think about things that they otherwise wouldn’t.”

No One Ever Really Dies

But where other people might balk at the beloved figure of Chainsaw Man, the continually-evolving Thompson decided to lean into this kind of fare. Because where Into the Unbeing tried to “hide” some of its messaging, Cemetery Kids Don’t Die is brazen in its attempts to win over a young audience who needs stories that are both cool and important contextually.

“So Cemetery Kids…it’s also scratching at the same types of things [as Into the Unbeing] but through a very different lens,” Thompson said. “One goal with Cemetery Kids was how do I take a bunch of the stuff that I really love, like [David] Cronenberg-ian body horror and how we use technology and how technology uses us, and then actually filter it down into a YA audience, essentially, making it more appealing. I wrote two books, Lonely Receiver and I Breathed a Body, both in the same thematic space, and they were very heady and never writing down to an audience.”

What we get with Cemetery Kids Don’t Die, then, is three friends (Enid, Birdie, and Wilson) enter a virtual game world to save their other friend (Pik, who is also Birdie’s brother) in a story that, on first glance, is like a cyberpunk Jumanji. But Cemetery Kids Don’t Die is so much more than that — it’s a proper chronicle of what it really means to be young right now.

“Realistically, having a nephew…who plays video games all the time, and seeing how much his worldview is contextualized by all of this, really made me think a lot more about, ‘Well, there’s a generation of kids where there’s no distinction between the technological self and the real self,’ Thompson said. “I grew up in the era where I had to get an Ethernet adapter for my GameCube to get it online. I remember a world before the internet. And so this all feels very separate to me, but I think there’s a very seamless existence in both online spaces and the real world these days.”

Speaking to kids where they live, then, is a chance to get them into other cool things.

“The best stuff for me is always a conduit towards its influences, right? You find something and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what’s Cronenberg?’ And then you go on this journey and discover for yourself because you fell in love with this other thing,” Thompson said. “And so it was a challenge, but it was something I was super up for because I kept thinking about was, ‘Well, not to be  crass or sales pitch-y or whatever, but how do I write something that is more widely approachable but still deals with the things that I love to deal with?'”

Thompson added, “Like, let’s give them all kick-ass character designs in the game that are very visually striking. Let’s make the distinction between the real world and the game world very visually striking. And then the anchor between the two things, let’s make that as fucked up and weird looking as you can be possible but never address it.”

What we get, then, isn’t just about catering to the lives of the Gen Z crowd. No, it’s a vital question (and, as noted, a long-time fave in Thompson’s notebook): What are you — man or machine? — and why’s that distinction mean a damn thing?

“How do I talk to a younger audience about, essentially, the mind-body distinction,” Thompson said. “Like, where do I stop and where do I start? What am I? Am I the thing that goes into the game and then comes out, or is every time I die…some piece of me is to remain in this digital space? Every time I share something online, am I losing a piece of myself?”

And Thompson even has a rather universal analogy to help explain this important but vague experience.

“I always think about if I go to a concert and I’m recording videos and taking photos just to put on Instagram, I sometimes have a harder time remembering the concert because I was actually focused on what I was doing on my phone,” Thompson said. “And so now people think I’m crazy because I’m like a monk – I go to events and my phone doesn’t come out. But then I look through my memories and I have no photos of anything because I just like to be present in the moment.”

Kill Your Darlings

At the same time, Cemetery Kids Don’t Die isn’t just for the youths. It’s also very much a commentary of sorts on horror, and how the best of this genre focuses on the terror of having a physical body. (Something your average teen is only just beginning to truly grasp.)

“Lonnie [Nadler, friend and former co-writer] and I have had countless conversations about this late into the night about the intimacy of body horror,” Thompson said. “A slasher is… this guy is stalking you through the woods running after you. There’s some sort of level of detachment from that.”

Thompson added, “A lot of people have woken up and been like, ‘Is that a herpes sore on my face? And am I going to have to go to work and present myself?’ So putting the source of the horror inside the person, it is a very intimate, invasive experience that you have to really confront. Again, the mind-body distinction – the body is breaking down, but it’s the mind that has to actually deal with it, right? I think that that’s really fascinating.”

And Thompson does make readers truly deal with it. Because Cemetery Kids Don’t Die is not interested in thinking less of its audience, and the book trusts folks to have the depth and curiosity to manage these huge ideas.

“We live in this cynical era where people think the audience is dumb,” Thompson said. “I choose the opposite POV: The audience is very smart and the audience will roll with you. That’s something that I really admire from Cronenberg’s work. Like, you have the video game console, and it’s never really a question of, ‘Where did this come from?’ That’s interesting to me because I think we live in a world where a lot of media is caught up in anything that’s strange about your world, you’re supposed to explain and over-explain. And I’m very much like, ‘I’m just going to present this and whatever you think is going to be way more validating for you as a reader.'”

Still, Thompson isn’t exactly afraid of losing readers.

“Lonnie and I, when we co-wrote everything, we used to say, ‘We’ve probably lost a reader here, but fuck ’em,'” Thompson said.

OK, it’s not about telling your audience per se to kick rocks. Or even just that their body’s going to betray them. Rather, it’s about being unafraid to do things that are daring and odd and that might leave some folks in the dirt, scratching their heads/rears. It’s a lesson learned from one of Thompson’s own writing “heroes,” the aforementioned Jeff VanderMeer.

“You’re flipping through and the saturation of the ink is going down,” Thompson said of VanderMeer’s extra kooky 2017 novel, Borne. “And then there’s this repetition of words or there’s all this white space. It’s a narrative experiment. If you listen to VanderMeer talk about that book, he is testing people’s patience and stuff, but it’s also just playing with the form.”

It’s something that even appears rather heavily in the aforementioned Into the Unbeing: Part Two.

“The beginning…there’s such a crazy shift,” Thompson said. “I wanted the book to go back to the 1800s, and we’re not going to hand-told and there’s gonna be no framing; you’re just going open it up and people are going to assume that the second arc is in 1875. Then you get 22 pages into the issue and then, boom, the characters are immersed in this story.”

It’s all a tried and true approach of weird fiction, a “genre” championed by the likes of VanderMeer. As the name implies, it’s about embracing the wackiness and insanity of life in the name of truly great stories.

“I think it excels when you’re in that weird space where you just don’t quite know what’s going on, but you have to give that moment of relief where things do click into place,” Thompson said. “That’s the delicate pacing of weird fiction or anything like that. I know the reader’s patience is going to be tested, but when they get to this page here, they’re going to realize what’s happening and then they’ll be all in.”

Going Nuts

All of those ideas/insights about audience engagement seem extra important as Thompson and co-creator Daniel Irizarri ready the release of Cemetery Kids Don’t Die‘s sequel, Cemetery Kids Run Rabid. Having escaped Nightmare Cemetery with Pik, the friends swear off the game outright. Until, of course, the “newest DLC, The Blighted Sprawl, suddenly appears online with a promise to reveal the truth of what actually lurks at the heart of Nightmare Cemetery’s digital darkness…”

Cemetery Kids Run Rabid takes place a year after the original — a move that wasn’t always popular with the book’s publisher, Oni Press.

“There was a little bit of tension in terms of whether or not it should be a direct continuation,” Thompson said. “And I was of the mind that it shouldn’t be. Early on, Oni and I had conversations where they were like, ‘Look, like this should just pick up moments after the first arc ended. And I said, “Well, no, I think that, realistically with the way that the first arc ends, you should allow some time to pass.'”

So, how did Thompson persuade Oni to see things his way? Why, with the most rational move ever.

“Well, I’m a crazy person, so I wrote both versions of them,” Thompson said. “I showed them both and said, ‘I like this one better.’ Then they said, ‘We agree with you.'”

Some of that other script still exists in the final product; Thompson said there’s a “little tiny flashback,” adding, “I thought it makes sense for readers who’ve never read Cemetery Kids Don’t Die to at least have that frame for, ‘Hey, Pik came back and here’s his POV on what he was like in the immediate moment after arc one.'”

And as far as niceties are concerned, that’s about all you can expect from Cemetery Kids Run Rabid. Because while the second arc is simple enough on the surface — “It’s, ‘Well, is this [Pik] or is it someone else?’ It then gets into that mind-body distinction and who are we,” Thompson said — the story proper goes so much deeper and harder.

“I want to make sure that it’s a meaner, scarier book than arc one,” Thompson said. “And so the things that I put the characters through are a lot worse, but also they start to explore casual drug use. And we start to see what that looks like in this world. We start to see the idea of, ‘Well, if you tell yourself a big enough lie, what does that do to your psyche?'”

Old Friends, New Pain

Part of that “shift,” then, is giving room to new perspective characters to stand up. That’d mean Wilson, who after the first arc is left physically altered and unable to utilize the book’s primary gaming system, the Dreamwave.

“I really wanted to write about Wilson as the POV character in the new arc,” Thompson said. “He was always in the background supporting everyone in the first arc. I wanted to write about the other observer. It wasn’t his story in the first arc. The second one is his story, but he’s seeing people get so concerned about Pik. His hair is falling out and he’s irrevocably changed by that experience in arc one. And everyone’s more concerned about the guy who woke up and seems to be fine. I really wanted the game to leave this lasting effect on everyone and physically change their bodies.”

Thompson added, “Wilson can’t go out with his friends anymore and do this thing that defined him for a really long time. What do you do? How do you fit back in? How do you reintegrate? And can you find a new identity for yourself? It’s a horror book, so it’s not easy.”

Other characters, meanwhile, also get to grapple further with these kinds of issues. It seems like change and transformation isn’t so egalitarian, and we must all face it on our own.

“The first arc of Cemetery Kids…the trauma that Birdie is holding onto is the fact that she was in a car accident, and she can’t use her legs anymore,” Thompson said. “And her brother seems to be fine. And obviously he’s got all kinds of emotional baggage, but physically he’s fine. He was transformed. I wanted to make sure that the book had disability representation because that’s something that’s very important to me. And I don’t see a lot out there.”

Thompson was inspired in part by his own dad, who experienced a stroke some 30 years ago and has relied on caregivers (including Thompson). It’s a concept to which Thompson is deeply familiar: We are all always on the verge of being irrevocably changed.

“The idea of these things that physically change us, and then you have to just carry on,” Thompson said. “There’s that quote, I don’t even know who it’s described to, but the idea that disability is something that everyone has to deal with eventually. It’s not just something that happens to a select few of people; it is something that comes for us all.”

The Great Escape

It’s all part of an overarching theme that Thompson expertly but bluntly described as “no sunshine.” It’s not just about torturing these kids, though. No, Thompson very much wants to continue to be true to what it’s really like being a teenager and the horrors of growing up in this or any time.

“I thought a lot about what was my life like when I was 14. And it was brutal,” Thompson said. “I didn’t like it. Those were some of the most unhappy years of my life. And so I started to think about that and I started to think about, ‘Well, what was my journey? How was I trying to define myself? How was I trying to kind of find a future?'”

It’s a universal sentiment, sure, but also one very much shaped by the writer’s own youth in the very early days of the new millennium and the bonkers things some of us faced back then. (And I don’t just mean, like, JNCO jeans.)

“We had 9-11 and all that stuff that happened where the world changed when I was younger,” Thompson said. “But at the same time, a lot of my stuff was focused on my interpersonal relationships and my family life. And so that’s really what you’re hung up on at that point in time. And then if you add in the factor of the world’s on fire…life ain’t easy. So why pull our punches? Why not explore the reality of that? There’s plenty of fiction that deals with the shitty quality of being a teenager, but I think there’s a lot that also romanticizes that time.”

So rather than romanticize anything, Thompson instead explores how teens like the Cemetery Kids would deal with the hellish life of puberty.

“I think it’s really interesting to just explore, like, what does escapism look like? How do you log out of real life and log into something else,” Thompson said. “The places that I found the most community were World of Warcraft when I was a teen. I went and hung out with people because it was preferable to the real world. And so I really wanted to talk about that, too, where it’s like the real world can suck, but then you can find this secondary space that can be just as valid and have all these wonderful memories and experiences. And you’re literally just sitting in a room immobile the whole time.”

Thompson added, “The video game [in Cemetery Kids] is going to be a vehicle for dealing with their interpersonal trauma. And then all the scenes in the real world, they’re just going to be talking about the video game and how to figure out. And I was like, ‘That’s the tension of the two worlds…it’s what allows us to have our cake and eat it too, right?”

By delving into these places, we see that nobody’s ever truly escaped a darn thing. (Except maybe aggro parents for a brief period.) Instead, these online spaces, or what they represent, becomes a chance to embrace your weird, ugly feelings head on.

“I can remember it being in first year university, and every single day going to class and not participating in class at all, but sitting in the back and talking about leaks of maybe the new Super Smash Bros. characters with my friends,” Thompson said. “You just find community wherever you can, right? And oftentimes young people in particular just build it. You just find it and you build it and then it becomes your whole life. Like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about what’s going on with my parents.’ And then if you’re playing World of Warcraft for six hours, then you start to just tell someone about it. They come out of you because you just have this moment of vulnerability and you’re just in the space where you’re also otherwise distracted. Then suddenly these worlds collide and they become a vehicle of self-discovery.”

Still a Future to be Had

And all of Thompson’s recent “vehicles” have quite the shelf life attached and story depths to explore. While Into the Unbeing is “done for now,” Thompson said he and Sherman are both down to do more stories down the road. Same for Cemetery Kids, it seems.

“It’s actually designed to be an engine that could just keep going for as long as Daniel and I want to do it,” Thompson said. “I have an idea of where it all goes in the end and what we want the ending to be. And, realistically, there’s Cemetery Kids all over the planet, right? There’s a definite manga influence with that book in particular, and so it sort of sits on the shelf nicely beside your Chainsaw Man.”

Those projects, however, remain mostly hypothetical. In the meantime, Thompson is also working on something of a dream project. Well, a dream for him but maybe not so much for the rest of us.

“I’ve been socking away a lot of ideas into something that spiritually is almost the follow-up to Into the Unbeing,” Thompson said. “I’ve been living on an island for the last couple years that is basically made of sandstone and it’s eroding. I lived through a hurricane where I saw our shores reduced by several feet. So a body horror, deep ocean vehicle to talk about all these things has been on my mind lately.”

Yet whatever he’s working on, there’s no denying that Thompson as a creator and person has changed.

“Maybe three or four years ago if you asked me that question [of a “dream project”], it would be, ‘Batman finds a dead body with a strange synthetic pair of lungs in the corpse and he has to figure out who’s making these strange automaton men,'” Thompson said. “My priorities have definitely shifted, and the things that I want to do are not solely IP-based anymore, which I think is probably pretty healthy.”

Sure, that might mean fewer bizarre Dark Knight stories in the world. (For now, at least…) However, it does mean that a creator like Thompson — someone building toward sustained greatness as a daring and engaging writer — gets to focus on the things that really matter. And that’s changing things for the better, where comics gets to tell even more stories that mean a damn.

“Now my thing is like, ‘OK, I’ve got these beautiful trees in the ground,” Thompson said. “I want to just water these and let these grow into these big things because I’ve never really had the opportunity.’ I’ve always been told by publishers that you’ve got five issues and then you’re kind of done. The math has changed.”

Into the Unbeing: Part One is out now. The Into the Unbeing: Part Two TPB arrives October 7 via Dark Horse.

Cemetery Kids Don’t Die is in stores. Cemetery Kids Run Rabid #1 drops August 13 from Oni Press.