Goobers would have you believe it’s simply top-notch horror.
“I feel like what I did was I made a document of movie references that I really enjoy,” said writer Cody Ziglar. “In the actual script, I had little screenshots from ’80s and ’90s schlock movies that I sent over. And from the conversation we’ve had, [artist] Ryan [Lee]’s into that same niche — like Night of the Creeps and Critters. This definitely is a love letter to those films.”
For Ziglar, that love of horror is almost essential to his very being.
“I grew up before cable was a huge thing in my part of the town; we just had bunny years,” said Ziglar. “So where things we were watching were on public access or the three channels that we had. So it was a lot of Elvira, a lot of random kung-fu movies, and crappy Ultraman. Just whatever they could play for free. Also, my neighbors were my aunt and uncle, and so they were huge horror fans. We got into all those movies was through them. I just loved that stuff — it was so cool seeing like, like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be watching this. I just feel like I shouldn’t be seeing this.'”
Lee also recalls that so much of life involved horror to one degree or another.
“I didn’t watch tons of horror movies when I was younger, but I feel like it was everywhere I went,” said Lee. “And I always loved monsters. I remember going to the grocery store and they’d have huge racks of magazines and seeing Fangoria and I flip through it. It always compelled me and I was drawn to it, but I was also afraid of it. Like, there’s a visual of this guy with a hammer in his face. It’s burned into my memory when I was 9.”
But Goobers isn’t just a horror book about a young man (Clayton) and his friends returning to a small town for a vacation only to find said town overrun by alien bug-infested friends/neighbors. It’s also very much a proper celebration of small town life.
“My perspective is that I think you can tell when the commentary is coming from outside the community as opposed within the community,” said Ziglar. “I grew up in that town, or a version of that town. I also wrote this script when I was home during COVID — for six months, I just moved back to North Carolina because I was tired of L.A. I was just in that bubble for so long and dealing with a lot of insecurities that I had.”
Not only did moving back home help with Goobers, but even more of Ziglar’s viewing habits further shaped the tone and feel of the larger series.
“I was also rewatching Eastbound and Down and Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones,” said Ziglar. “And what I love so much about those shows is that they capture such a specific type of South and North Carolina asshole so very well. They capture the towns and the reality so well and yet you never feel like they’re punching down on the people. It feels like this is just an environment where these unique characters can exist.”
Main cover by Ryan Lee. Courtesy of Vault Comics.
But ultimately, Ziglar thinks it’s Lee’s own artistry (as joined by colorist K. Michael Russell and letterer AndWorld Design) that really sealed the deal for Goobers.
“So, again to the credit of Ryan’s character design, there are so many people that just look off in a way that you can only find in a Southern town, but not often a way where you want to make fun of them. They just look like a unique character,” said Ziglar. “You read so many books or watch so many TV shows and movies and everyone just looks the same. So it’s very refreshing to find, like, ‘Oh, that’s a character.’ And even if they’re just in the background; that person stands out and that’s something that I really admired about where I grew up. I think you can appreciate things and find the funny, odd things without the take that we’ve all seen when it comes to Southern towns.”
Lee also very much leaned into his other works in the horror genre for some general shape and direction.
“In this other horror book I did, Mountainhead, that took place in like a small resort town,” said Lee. “But one thing I really focused on in that, and also in this, is that everyone looked unique. I feel like someone can have so much story and it makes all the characters look a little different, even when things are drawn cartoony, and that they have a built-in tale. It gives the world a little more, maybe not realism, but it feels more real.”
And, of course, Lee really leaned into Ziglar’s own horror-referencing doc.
“I like having as much reference and as many little pieces as I can,” said Lee. “I feel like these little amalgamations happen in your own mind, and I can just absorb all of it and it just meshes naturally that way.”
But he also went further to try and really nail the look of lead Clayton’s quirky Southern burg, Pine Cove.
“I like doing research, too,” said Lee. “I don’t know a lot about rural North Carolina. So I did a lot of research and I’m going off of lists of things in North Carolina. It’s all broad strokes. I don’t think you see a lot of that visually in the book, but the vibe is huge for me. Some of our characters do drive to pickup trucks, but I think there’s more interesting things than just weird accents and that they like to drink beer. I think there’s some more fun stuff to have with that.”
So, how’d Lee do in recreating the small-town feel? Ziglar indicated that he not only had no notes — “the only other book that I’ve had this with was Spider-Punk” — but one random design choice by Lee proved especially jaw-dropping.
“This is such a small detail that’s probably only important to me, but you drew a water tower that looks like the exact water tower in my hometown,” said Ziglar. “I’ve only seen the water tower in North Carolina, and I was like, ‘How did he nail that so perfectly?’ It’s been in the back of my mind for weeks now.”
And speaking of accurate depictions in small town horror, there’s one little tidbit worth mentioning — especially ‘cause it involves the seminal 2003 classic Cabin Fever.
“The scene where the kid does, like, a kung-fu flip off the store is right next to my hometown,” said Ziglar.
Cabin Fever aside, all of that speaks to another essential truth about Goobers that makes it more than just wonderfully schlocky horror. It’s as much a celebration of the very act of creation by a group (but especially between Ziglar and Lee).
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
“I feel like in every creative thing that I’ve worked in, having a shorthand just makes it so much easier,” said Ziglar. “Like, I don’t have to describe what the tone is or the minutiae. This is something that we picked up a lot from the Rick and Morty room. It’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m feeling like we want to do like a Body Snatchers episode’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we instantly know what that means.’ Like, there’s going to be paranoia. There’s going to be some cool creature designs. It’s probably going to be a guy in a trenchcoat who’s like, ‘The sky is falling.'”
Lee, meanwhile, appreciated the focus that such a shorthand offers.
“It feels pretty natural,” said Lee. “It helps when you get the vibe going a little bit and you understand all those touchstones. So it’s been a really fun book to work on and collaborate with Cody and the rest of the team. You’re talking about speed in terms of just kind of getting to something..I feel like there’s like 15 wrong answers and only one right one sometimes, you know? You never know how it’s going to go and I just want to make sure the vision is proper, and I know sometimes some people are afraid to say things or they’re just secretly unhappy with something. I don’t think that’s the case here.”
Ziglar thanked Lee for facilitating their “dialogue,” adding that “the character designs, the way that the scenes are drawn, the way they’re colored after the fact…truly a lot of the heavy lifting has been done by the art.” Lee not only thanked Ziglar in return, but he took it further still: it’s not just about that balancing act but also getting to know these characters on a near-elemental level.
“I don’t want to exaggerate the characters when something’s happening, but I don’t want them to go complete rat fink,” said Lee. “I’ve got to pull it back a little bit every now and then, you know? But if someone’s face is exploding, well, you can go pretty far with that. I feel like the strength of the dialogue leads itself to dictating how I draw and how they gesture, and their mannerisms and facial expressions. And I really like drawing facial expressions. It’s a constant ebb and flow of giving each other a hard time and being sincere.”
Lee added, “It just makes it really easy to come up with what their motivation is in each frame and it just makes it easier to draw because I know how they feel; that comes through very strongly in the dialogue. But they also respond to each other in very consistent ways for each character. It really does feel like I’m just drawing these real people. I don’t know them, but I feel like I get what they’re doing and how they would behave.”
Still, it’s not just about sharing “lots of thumbs up and green hearts emojis in the Slack,” as Ziglar explained. This deeply collaborative spirit is very much at the heart of Goobers, maybe even more than all the blood and exploding human bodies and whatnot.
Clayton and his friends — Andy, Kyle, and Laura — aren’t just facing off against the titular Goobers, but dealing with the intricacies of friendship, how that’s shaped by their own personal issues, and how this important construct moves and evolves over a weird weekend getaway.
“You want to have different points of view,” said Ziglar. “It came natural for me because I’ve written for so many TV shows where there are Morty and Summer and She-Hulk and Nikki. The benefit of that is that because you have to write so many different perspectives and voices it becomes natural. And I feel like if you’re going to have a character who’s dour and whiny like Clayton, you want to have someone that calls that character out. Also in these movies, you having the annoying character, which is where Kyle came from. I think you also want the character that sits in between both worlds, and that’s where Andy comes from.”
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
On the one hand, Ziglar created a cast of four people of color because it felt the most natural to him, which extends Goobers‘ more organic qualities.
“I based it off a bunch of my friends,” said Ziglar. “Like, Andy is just my friend, a super cool kid, also from North Carolina, who was Laotian and loved hip-hop dancing. And we were best friends in film school and that’s why I put him in and that’s why I based that character off of him.”
At the same time, though, there’s no denying that have four non-white leads in a horror story is still something of a novel and important take. Still, for Ziglar, it was about just providing key perspectives because a book like Goobers almost demanded it.
“We’ve seen one particular type of story told from one perspective for so long,” said Ziglar. “Maybe you get a woman’s perspective, but that’s really it. So, what happens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers when everyone is black? We’re going to react to things much differently than I think we’re used to seeing in these types of stories. It’d be interesting to see this point of view because I haven’t seen a lot of those stories told from that point of view.”
Sure, lots of other horror books try to balance the gory and the deeply human. But with Goobers, there’s more informing that process.
“I think it helped coming from a comedy background,” said Ziglar. “Some shows are more comedy-forward than the others that I’ve been lucky enough to work on. But one important lesson that we took away from Rick and Morty is that it’s all about the balance. A show like that is 70% comedy and 30% drama. So you can have Rick turn himself into a pickle and make a suit out of rats and fight a bunch of weird Eastern European embassy guys. But then the end is just a very grounded therapy scene between a family that’s falling apart because their grandfather would rather do that than deal with the traumas that he’s inflicted.”
Lee not only had a slightly similar take, but he also had another important but novel frame of reference.
“You definitely touched on something there about situational humor,” said Lee. “It’s not meant to crack you up…it just feels very organic in that scene. The Wire is a good example of that. It’s tragic and crazy, but there are moments in that show that are absolutely hilarious. And I see that in a lot of Coen Brothers stuff too…everything’s just built right in. I feel like sometimes a lot of humor can come from just what we were talking about: the looks of characters and the environment they’re in.”
Of course, you can’t ever forget about an OG of the horror-comedy genre.
“I had a balance that I had with this…I don’t want to be too funny, but I also don’t want to be too dramatic. So a big touch-point of reference for me was Shaun of the Dead,” said Ziglar. “That’s a movie that I think is the perfect balance between horror and comedy. When it first came out, that was the funniest thing on the planet. And I rewatched it maybe last year and I thought, ‘This actually reads more like a horror movie now.’ Like, ‘This is a lot scarier than I remember it actually being.’ And that’s the energy that I wanted to bring for Goobers — maybe the first time you read it, it’s a lot more funny. And then the second time you read it, after putting it down for a while it’s like, ‘Oh, this is spookier than I remember.’
Courtesy of Vault Comics.
Because characters are also like readers: if you respect them properly, you’re just going to have a better time.
“I think you want to take the serious moments seriously,” said Ziglar. “But I also feel like people going into this book, or any horror-adjacent thing already, I think they’re built a little bit different. They know to expect something. It’s like Ryan said: you can expect some comedy with your horror. There’s one Friday the 13th where Jason literally just gets dropped into a VR simulation where two campers are having sex. I think part of that is not trying to out-think your audience. I think people reading this know that they’re in on the joke, and part of the fun comes from embracing that.”
All of that leads to a really interesting point Ziglar made during our Zoom call. True devotees of horror, fans and creators alike, approach the genre with a joy, reverence, and intensity that often feels in contrast to your average flick. But the real ones know.
“And as I got older, I really started to appreciate the actual technical skill involved,” said Ziglar. “Like, I can’t remember where I read this interview or watched this video, but someone was talking about how people that are really into horror have this mindset where they can watch these really low budget or objectively very bad movies, but they watch it as a way to study it. Like, like how did they get this technique? Like, how did they create this cast or how did they do this blood gag or whatever?”
Ziglar added, “And there’s a very academic way that you view these types of movies, and I appreciate that sense. It’s just so cool going from Peter Jackson’s Braindead to Lord of the Rings and watching his evolution between, ‘I’m going to have a guy chop up a bunch of people with the lawnmower and then get eaten by his zombie monster mom to ‘You don’t simply walk into Mordor.’ Like, it’s such crazy storytelling. I love seeing the evolution of that stuff. And it just really scratched the itch I didn’t know I had when I was growing up.”
But while Goobers is certainly a different kind of beast, there’s no denying it’s joining a rather packed marketplace of great horror comics. For his part, Ziglar doesn’t put too much thought into it.
“There’s so many TV shows and movies that are out that if I think about the competition, I’m never going to get anything done,” said Ziglar. “Like, I’m paralyzed by fear. I’m just going to make my book. I hope that it finds the people that it finds and they enjoy it. Just because the idea of comparison will cripple me if I think about, ‘Oh, Something is Killing the Children is also right next to us, are they going to grab that?’ It’s just too much pressure for me to put on myself and too much stress.”
Lee, however, had a slightly different take. It’s one that feels a little joyous and warm and yet embraces the bloody madness of it all. In short, the very spirit of Goobers.
“I read a lot and I watch a lot of stuff,” said Lee. “And I just think it’s cool that people are so open to horror now. When you see a show like The Walking Dead that’s such a humongous hit and people are watching pretty crazy and gory stuff. And it’s on mainstream network television and people are loving it. Kids are dressing up as zombies. People are just more susceptible to accepting these things and maybe picking them up and checking them out. Like, I love that there’s so much horror everywhere I go. It’s great to see.”
Goobers #1 hits shelves on September 18 via Vault Comics. (FOC is Monday, August 19.)
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