Unspeakable Horror!

This is the first entry for my new blog dedicated to Bartholomew of the Scissors, my forthcoming horror comic from Blue Water Productions. 

The first issue of the comic is in production,  and I have to say that Daniel Crosier is doing an amazing job as the artist on the project.  His unique artistic style, which involves illustrating the pages on wood, brings an amazing intensity to the characters and the action.  Over the last five years of working on Bartholomew of the Scissors as a novel, I have always had a specific image of Bartholomew's face in my mind.  Daniel Crosier's interpretation of Bartholomew looks nothing like what I pictured, but the Bartholomew he designed is much, much scarier and infused with a life I could never give Bartholomew on the page.  From now on, I will definitely see the Bartholomew that Daniel Crosier has imagined. 

Who is Bartholomew of the Scissors?

Bartholomew started in the Winter of 2001 when I was walking through a densely forested arboretum on my way to graduate school at Western Washington University.  I was thinking about my linguistics homework when I had a vision of an armada of shiny scissors floating out of the forest shadows into the sunlight.  It really gave me the creeps.  Since I was always looking for new horror ideas, I knew that inspiration had struck.  That was the beginning.  The Scissor Swarm was born.  

At first, I imagined the Scissor Swarm as like some kind of poltergeist that manifested in hundreds of stainless steel sewing shears (just like the kind I used as a child when I used to make little stuffed monsters out of felt, stuffing, and thread).  The Scissor Swarm attacked people like the seagulls in Hitchock's Birds or a school of piranha.  It seemed like a terrifying idea, but next I had to figure out what was behind the Scissor Swarm.  Almost immediately, I came up with the idea that a wounded child was behind the malevolence of the Scissor Swarm, a child who was not altogether unsympathetic, but very volatile and dangerous -- perhaps even psychotic.  When it came time to pick a name for this murdered child, Bartholomew, for some reason, was the first and most resonant name. 

I knew it had to be Bartholomew of the Scissors.