One of the go-to scary stories is the haunted house tale; it’s as easy to tell one sitting around a campfire as it is to make a horror picture out of one. One recent haunted house story that may have slipped under your radar — but shouldn’t have — is the 2021 comic mini-series “The Me You Love In The Dark.”
Artist Ro Meadows has a showcase deadline approaching. So, she rents an old house in the midwest, thinking she needs some isolation to create. Her real estate agent warns her that her chosen house is rumored to be haunted, but Ro feels too drawn in to pass it up. As she still struggles to paint, she learns the house wasn’t empty even before she moved in.
“The Me You Love In The Dark” is the work of writer Skottie Young and artist Jorge Corona (who is currently killing it as artist on the best-selling “Transformers” comic). The comic is their second team-up, sandwiched between “Middlewest,” and their new Western, “Ain’t No Grave.” All three comics suggest they are a new comic-making force to look out for.
Speaking to AIPT, Young and Corona mentioned they first plotted the story shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began. They felt like they’d been dealt an unwinnable hand, having conceived a comic about someone trapped in a house when their readers had just gone through their own horror story like that. Instead, it made their comic even more resonant. It helps that “The Me You Love In The Dark” captures the most essential part of the cabin fever experience: it has a slow onset.
The confined setting and Corona’s rhythmic paneling mean that “The Me You Love In The Dark” is a breezy read — the five issues flow easily as one. Each of the five covers follow a pattern; at the top of the page, the house is sitting on top of a black void. Beneath that, there’s a scene featuring the characters. In issue #1’s cover, it’s Ro with her back turned into the darkness as two shadowed hands stretch out towards her easel.
This is a book you can judge by its cover. The comic mixes true horror with a cartoony art style (take Ro’s impossibly huge, blue enough to be opaque glasses), but is no less scary despite how unrealistic it looks.
“The Me You Love In The Dark” invites comparisons to horror writer legend Stephen King. The collected edition’s back cover blurb mentions King (and Neil Gaiman, for there’s a lot of “Coraline” in this comic too) and someone in the book name-checks “The Shining.” Like that book, this one is also about a creative who tries to use isolation to get ahead on work. (Though Jack Torrance was a writer while Ro is a painter.) Their work-vacation goes awry when they meet something in the house that holds possessive ill-intent.
Despite the warranted “Shining” comparisons, the dynamic between Ro and the house ultimately becomes closer to another (almost as good) Stephen King book: “Misery,” which is about an author held hostage by a deluded fan.
