Unspeakable Horror!

Bartholomew of the Scissors started out as a powerful poltergeist.  A fourteen-year-old boy murdered by scissors, he comes back from the grave in the form of the Scissor Swarm, acting out his vengeance  on anyone who enters his forest.  So, Bartholomew basically started out as a slasher, killing hikers and drunk college students.  He started out really evil. 

Enter Jessica, the powerful psychic hero.  In the first version of the story, Jessica captures Bartholomew in her mind, almost as if her brain were some kind of psychic womb-prison, and Jessica goes crazy as a result (lots of mental hospital scenes).  However, over the course of drafting the story, this provided too many storytelling problems, and so Bartholomew changed from a disembodied ghost into a very peculiar undead boy, and Jessica also gained new powers (more about that later). 

Enter Gordon Watt, the paranormal detective whose hair is ghostly white because he's had so many encounters with the supernatural.  Gordon is basically a paranormal version of the film-noir detective.  His roots can be found in a combination of  Marlowe (Bogart), Kolchak (Night Stalker), and Agent Mulder. 

The story started out with Gordon and Jessica teaming up to capture the malevolent force of Bartholomew.  However, while working on the story, I began to study the basics of Jungian archetypes, and the archetype of the shadow figure and the trickster began to change my whole perspective on Bartholomew.  Instead of the evil, malevolent slasher, Bartholomew became the ambivalent shadow/trickster, capable of performing terrible acts of violence, but also capable of providing help to the heroes.  Even though their characters are completely different, I started to see a connection between Bartholomew and Hannibal Lecter.  Basically, audiences like Hannibal Lecter (even though he does very nasty things), and Hannibal helps the hero of the story solve the mystery, in addition to causing bloody mayhem.  Like the trickster, Bartholomew became a force of great chaos, but through his mayhem, he ultimately helps the heroes and the progress of the story reach resolution.  

In his character design of Bartholomew, Daniel Crosier has brought vivid life to the devilish child that is Bartholomew, while simultaneously making his evil little face very likeable.  Just wait until you see him!