The Haunted Mansion artist/writer: D.W.Frydendall
By: Dave Ehrlich

Foolish mortals everywhere will have reason to host their own swinging wakes when SLG Publishing, in partnership with Disney Publishing Worldwide, releases the first issue of The Haunted Mansion, a comic book anthology based on the classic Disney E Ticket attraction. Scheduled for an October 2005 release, The Haunted Mansion will feature stories by some of SLG Publishing's top creators including Roman Dirge (Lenore), Serena Valentino (Gloomcookie, Nightmares & Fairy Tales), and D.W.Frydendall. Read our interview with D.W.Frydendall below!

BD: What was your first sort of exposure to horror...well, horror illustrations, to be specific? You know, what really stuck with you after seeing it as a kid?

DWF: When I was younger, the neighbors...I used to take care of their cats. I'd go over there, and they'd have the illustrated books of Edgar Allen Poe, and I always thought it was cool-looking, the art noveaux texts...I pulled it out and started looking through it, and low and behold, I came across Harry Clarke's stuff. Like "The Premature Burial", which is just absolutely brilliant..."The Masque of the Red Death" was another piece that I saw where I was just 'this is brilliant!'.

BD: And how old were you at this time?

DWF: Probably about...13?

BD: Just the right age for it to really get under your skin...

DWF: Yeah, where it matters, you know? And this was just when I was getting into horror stuff and it really struck a chord. A friend of mine went online and hunted down the book for me, and I was just like, "Oh my God, this is like the Holy Grail!".

BD: Was there any certain movie or TV show, horror-wise, that you remember really being formative?

DWF: When I was four years old, I remember, honestly, looking forward to watching "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" on ABC. I think it was Wednesday night? We'd be somewhere and I'd be, like, "We gotta get home, we gotta watch Kolchak the Night Stalker!" It had vampires and crazy swamp monsters, and that's brilliant. "In Search Of"..."The Amityville Horror"...I couldn't watch enough of that stuff.

BD: Oh god, I used to try and bribe and/or dare the babysitter to let me watch horror stuff on TV...

DWF: Well, yeah! (laughs)

BD: At what point did you start to manifest your horror interest through drawings?

DWF: As soon as I could draw! I was drawing the Wolfman in kindergarten. I've always been tweaked! I used to be picked on by a couple of kids, and one day, I got tired of it. So I drew them being torn to pieces by these demonic children, and they were put on a maypole...with their entrails wrappin' around it. (laughs) So, I Xeroxed it and gave it to all their friends! After that, they didn't mess with me anymore, they couldn't even look me in the eye! Which was kind of funny, I thought it was funny...but maybe that's just me being sociopathic! (laughs)

BD: Well, it's hard being a morbid child. (Laughs) It seems like, for a lot of kids, this kind of stuff hits them at just the right time...the effect of horror at a young age can be really influential. Some kids absorb that stuff and then just move on beyond it, and for some kids, it becomes this real inspiration.

DWF: There are creepy kids out there.

BD: Which is a beautiful thing.

DWF: Yeah! I'm meeting kids nowadays, they're like 16, 17, and they wanna do creepy horror stuff...and I say, do it! Don't stop, just go and do it! Don't do it for money, just do it because you like it.

BD: So, to switch gears a bit...as far as you working in black and white a lot...Most all of "The Creeps" (Frydendall's recently published collection of work from 1994-2004) is black and white...do you find that you prefer it to working in color?

DWF: I grew up doing pen and ink stuff, and I love doing it, but I remember being younger and taking watercolors to my black and whites, and trying to color them like comic books. It was a pain in the ass..until I got a computer. Doing color in the computer was a bit easier!

BD: I think your stuff, your style works so well in black and white, though.

DWF: There's a starkness.

BD: There's such a power to black and white...and shadow and grain....you can make stuff as gory as you want, or as gloppy and visceral as you want, but nothing's as scary as shadows...look at "Night of the Living Dead"....

DWF: Exactly. Or "Carnival of Souls".

BD: Perfect.

DWF: That's why I think a lot of the stuff in "The Creeps" works. One of the pieces that everyone says they love is the ghost coming out of the wall over the two kids. They sit there and they go "this is so messed up, it's one of the scariest things in the book" and I go, "Wait, you didn't like the corpses?!".

BD: "What about the fingers coming out of the eye sockets?!"

DWF: (Laughing) Yeah, like that kind of creepy stuff....and they go, "No...that's like a primal fear."

BD: So, you're currently working on The Haunted Mansion comic book for Slave Labor Graphics. Of course, the Haunted Mansion must've been a huge thing for you growing up...when did you first go there?

DWF: When I was about 3. I remember this, I really do. I saw it when I was really young, and my parents took me on both that and the Pirates of the Caribbean. I was a baby! Both of 'em freaked me out, and I was crying, so they rushed me over to It's A Small World.

BD: Oh, I used to flip out on that, that totally creeped me out as a really little kid.

DWF: Well, yeah...if you ever look at that, it's creepy. The Haunted Mansion, when I was a kid, it was like magic. Just going through there, and seeing all this great stuff....ghosts and ballrooms....

BD: What's the one scene or section of the ride that you remember really affecting you?

DWF: The popping-up heads!

BD: The ones in the graveyard, behind the tombstones?

DWF: Yeah! I remember those, since those were what startled me. Stuff like the exterior and the weeping willows...the graveyard outside...stuff like that. Walking up you know you're getting into a world of FUN when you see this big, sprawling three-story place, and you're like "Oh, this is rad!". The gargoyles in the elevator room, and all the stretching portraits, everything. That's when something in my head just (snaps fingers) switched.

BD: How did you get hooked up with Slave Labor Graphics for the Haunted Mansion comic book?

DWF: I met Dan Vado at the Alternative Press Expo. I had a booth and I was selling my books and my t-shirts and glassware, and Gris Grimley was nice enough to...see, Dan never leaves his booth, and this where, like, Gris rocks. He went over to Dan and said "You gotta meet my friend, Darren, you will get along with Darren," and he brought him by and we started talking. He liked my artwork, and he asked me where I was working. I said I was working at Disney, and he said "Well, funny thing, I just got the Haunted Mansion comic," and I said "Do tell! I have to send you artwork for the Haunted Mansion, my Hitchhiking Ghosts", which I'd done a year before.

BD: So, you'd already done some Haunted Mansion pieces prior to this?

DWF: I'd already done it, because my thing was, I was just drawing, I was just sitting there going "I'm gonna draw what I like...I'm gonna draw the Hitchhiking Ghosts in my style, all tweaked and messed up." Dan said to send me whatever I was working on, so I did, and he said "Okay, what do you wanna work on? This is great, what do you want to do for the comic?". I told him I wanted to draw and write, and he said "All right, you got it". I sent him the first five pages, and he loved it. At that point, I thought I would just continue drawing images of ghosts from the ride in my own style....and the feedback I got was just, like...(laughs)...I never thought anyone would like 'em, much less how much they liked 'em!

BD: Well, you love the ride, and your enthusiasm's gonna come across in the drawings...

DWF: Oh yeah! And it did...all those characters are just so fun. If I could do that for a living, just drawing characters from the Haunted Mansion...!

BD: How's the first issue going to be set up?

DWF: Well, the whole series is going to be an anthology...Dan's set it up, taking the characters, taking the back story that was never really developed. Whenever Imagineering does anything, there's always a back story. They have a definite story about everything. If you look at the ride itself, the attraction, it starts out where you're going through the ride, and it's kind of unnerving. You don't see any ghosts...you don't see anything weird...until after Madame Leota says "Okay...ghosts...appear!", and then they start showing all the really cool stuff. Before that, you just see the residual effects of the ghosts, like doors bending, locks openings...and that kind of stuff. And corpses. After that, you start to see the ghosts.

Click each pic to see full version

BD: It does seem to shift in tone...it goes from being very ominous to being kinda goofy-scary.

DWF: There were two warring factions when they were making the ride, there was Marc Davis and Claude Coats. Davis wanted to do something whimsical and funny, Coats wanted to do something that was ghastly and terrifying. Marc Davis was good at developing characters, whimsical characters...he'd done such a great job on the Pirates of the Caribbean. What happened was, they were developing (the Haunted Mansion), and Walt Disney died. A faction appeared in Imagineering, where you had the Marc Davis "cute" thing, and then you had the Claude Coats atmospheric, scary stuff. If you go on the ride, and you look at it, the first half of the ride is all atmospheric, creepy stuff...that's Coats. After that, when you get to the birthday party, and the graveyard, that's all Davis.

BD: To me, one of the most effective parts of the ride is just before you get on the Doom Buggy....the distorted paintings and the sculptured busts...that whole section from the elevator room to the Buggies is so well-done. But past that, the ride does sort of take a turn towards being lighter and funnier...you know, the Ghouls appearing in your Doom Buggy, all that stuff...

DWF: Yeah. If you look at all the wallpaper patterns, and the chairs with the faces in them...that's Rolly Crump (a member of the Imagineering team that developed the attraction). Go back and look at everything on the ride...everything has personality and faces. That came from an early prototype, The Museum of the Weird, and Walt liked it. (Crump) would have chairs that looked like a human face...all this kind of stuff, it was a little bit too outlandish. Walt said "That's good...but I don't know where I'm going to use it". When they started developing (the Haunted Mansion), that's why you have all that really cool stuff. It looks like when you're in the ride, the ride is looking back at you.

BD: The eyeballs in the wallpaper...

DWF: It's absolutely brilliantly done. That's Rolly Crump. There's so much cool stuff about this ride. Man, just to be a part of doing this comic book...! This book is gonna kick ass.

BD: How much creative control were you given? Did they just tell you to use any of the characters you wanted?

DWF: I'd send ideas to Dan, and he'd say "Okay, this is good" or "I'm not really into this...". The first story I did was this very E.C. type of comic. It starts out with the guy (from the attraction), the Caretaker, remember?...the guy with the dog...he gets fired from his job. The guy that runs the agency that he's at, his nephew heard that there's a treasure at the Gracie Manor (i.e.: the Haunted Mansion's actual name). So, he gets the guy fired, and he goes over to the Manor to steal the treasure...and the ghosts don't like that...

BD: That sounds awesome.

DWF: I'm trying to do classic ghost stories, but based around the Haunted Mansion. I have another story about the raven, the one you see on the ride that's everywhere. He's just talking about how people are always trying to get into his home, and how the inhabitants always take care of it.

BD: You're taking a much more menacing, scarier approach than the ride, it seems.

DWF: Yes. It's gonna be great. What I'm trying to do is focus on horror. There's so many killer artists on the project (Jon ‘Bean’ Hastings Christopher, Roman Dirge, Eric Jones), and they do really amazing stuff...a lot of the people working on the comic are making it more whimsical, and that's cool. That's what they do. (Pauses) I can't do whimsical. (Laughs)

BD: I understand. I always wanted the Haunted Mansion to be scarier...not disliking the light-heartedness of it or anything, but just wishing it was more sort of...actually frightening. And of course, that can't happen, you can't have the crap scared out of you at Disneyland. That's not the mood of the park, really.

DWF: Yeah, but when I was a kid, it did scare the crap out of me! What I wanted to do was to go back, and get that feeling, and bring it to an adult audience.

Disney’s HAUNTED MANSION comic will be available mid October from SLG (more details here. You can see artwork from the comic all through the month of October at Meltdown Comics at 7522 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. And D.W. Frydendall’s “The Creeps” is available through Amazon.com or forces-of-evil.com.