DF Interview: Sean Phillips draws a riveting horror thrill ride in the ‘Houses of the Unholy’ OGN

By Byron Brewer

An FBI agent from the cult crime beat and a woman with a past linked to the Satanic Panic are drawn into a terrifying hunt for an insane killer hiding in the shadows of the underworld. Can you ever escape your past, or are all your bad decisions just more ghosts to haunt you, wherever you go?

Houses of the Unholy is from bestselling creators Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, the award-winning team behind Criminal, Reckless, Night Fever and Where the Body Was. I chatted about the coming graphic novel with my friend, illustrator Sean Phillips.

Byron Brewer: Sean, Houses of the Unholy brings a difference of sorts to the usual crime thriller graphic novels from writer Ed Brubaker and yourself. There is a more dark and sinister nature to it. Was this type of tale something everyone’s favorite Eisner Award-winning creative duo has been itching to explore?

Sean Phillips: Ed maybe, but I just draw what I’m told.

Byron: I was alive back then but for sake of explanation, what was the Satanic Panic craze of the 1980s and how does it manifest itself in your coming work?

Sean Phillips: Well, the Satanic Panic didn’t reach the UK back then. Not many people here actually believe in the devil and the occult and stuff like that. But in the U.S., it came about as some children accused their parents or teachers or scout leaders or priests of using them in devil-summoning rituals. We took those ludicrous accusations and hung a story on them.

Byron: Introduce readers to your key protagonists for this OGN: “an FBI agent from the cult crime beat and a woman with a past linked to Satanic Panic”.

Sean Phillips: Natalie Burns was involved in such a devil-worshipping cult when she was a child and now spends her adult life rescuing people from similar cults. When other children from her past start dying in mysterious circumstances, an FBI agent investigating those deaths enlists her help to solve the case.

Byron: Talk about using your artist’s toolbox to bring forth the mood that is necessary for such a dark and horrific story. It’s obviously not just filling panel after panel with blackness. You have the acting of characters as well as the atmosphere to convey. Such things fascinate me.

Sean Phillips: Most of the books Ed and I do together follow a three tier grid and I continued that in this book as usual. To help make an oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere, I made all the pages full bleed with a black border on the flashback pages. Jake [Phillips] then adjusted his color palette to fit in with a darker story. Literally sometimes as a lot of the book takes place at night or in shadowy interiors. It made a nice contrast to our previous book, Where The Body Was, which was set mostly in a sunny Californian suburb.

Byron: For an OGN such as Houses of the Unholy, did you employ any different sort of considerations or techniques when it came to designing the characters? What character or set piece in the work is your favorite and/or most challenging?

Sean Phillips: I try to make each main character distinctive from the previous one so this time she had short cropped hair. Other than that, I don’t really know what they look like until I know what they’re doing. I never do character sketches before hand, they just sort of arrive on the page fully formed.

Byron: We have “an insane killer hiding in the shadows of the underworld”. Back in my days as a reporter, I listened to criminal profilers discuss “getting into the mind” of their quarry. What does an artist tap to similarly convey such a character/mood in this sort of storytelling? What do you harness to portray such physical and cerebral assassins?

Sean Phillips: I just try to make all the characters look believable. I didn’t even know who the bad guys were until they revealed their true intentions far into the book. So no foreshadowing possible!

Byron: Sean, can you bring any word on either another coming Reckless story or Amazon’s development of a Criminal television series – or both?

Sean Phillips: No plans for another Reckless book yet. I’m deep into a 200-page Criminal OGN right now, hopefully out in time for the TV show premiere. The show started filming last week, but it’ll be a while until I get to see anything of it. I hope to get over for a set visit as soon as possible, though.

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Sean Phillips for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions. Houses of the Unholy OGN from Image Comics is slated to be on sale August 14!

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