Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente have been stealthily working on a new horror mystery comic series! Friday, a previously unannounced series, has just debuted on Panel Syndicate. The first part of the comic, titled “The Girl in the Trees,” is available in both English and Spanish and is currently being sold on a pay-what-you-can basis. What is Friday, you ask?
From the creators: Friday Fitzhugh—girl detective—and Lancelot Jones—her best friend and also the smartest boy in the world—spent their childhoods solving crimes and digging up occult secrets. But that was years ago. And now Friday is in college and starting a new life on her own. She’s moved on. Until she returns home for the holidays and is immediately pulled back into Lance’s orbit. This is literally the Christmas vacation from Hell and neither of them may survive to see the New Year.
One of the most interesting parts of this project is Ed Brubaker’s genre description– he’s coined the term “post-YA” for the project and calls it “[A] genre that doesn’t really exist. It’s an idea I’ve been circling for a long time, that lets me tap into my own nostalgia for my youth and the YA books I loved back in the 70s and 80s – stuff like The Great Brain, or John Bellairs books, or Harriet the Spy, or Encyclopedia Brown. I want to take that concept of the teen detective and those supernatural mysteries aimed at kids, but then let the protagonists grow up, so they have all the same problems we all do… and they encounter a much more dangerous world.” That’s definitely a niche and largely unexplored set of parameters which remind me a bit of Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids, a comedic Lovecraftian horror novel based loosely on the Scooby-Doo gang. Maybe the literary trend going forward will include more aged-up nostalgia?
The art for Friday also sounds intriguing. Marcos Martin, the artist for the book, stated that prior to coming on board he had been experimenting with his comfort zone and the possibility of cross-hatching, so he lept at the chance to illustrate what Brubaker pitched to him as a “mixture of Edward Gorey and Lovecraft set in a New England-ish town in the late 60s/early 70s” If the cover is any indication, expect a lot of stark contrast and pen-and-ink style illustrations.
Friday is available now exclusively on Panel Syndicate!
