Last month saw the release of Rainbow Bridge, the first young reader graphic novel offering from AfterShock Comics’s new Seismic Press imprint. Now the next title from Seismic Press has been revealed, as AfterShock has announced Fearbook Club, a new middle-grade graphic novel from writer Richard Ashley Hamilton, artist Marco Matrone, and letterer Dave Sharpe. The book follows a middle school yearbook club as they investigate a group of ghosts who are haunting their school.
Here’s how AfterShock describes Fearbook Club:
When shy 6th-grade shutterbug Whit Garcia starts middle school, he’s forced to join a yearbook club with three other weirdos who will never be voted “most likely to succeed.” But after the ghosts of missing students start haunting them, Whit, Hester, Hillary and Press must solve the supernatural secret behind these spirits — or their yearbook club will be voted most likely to join them.
But are these ghostly students the real bad guys? Or are they just warning Whit and his friends? Warning them about a darkness beyond their schoolyard…a darkness that threatens to swallow the school – and its occupants – whole.
Fearbook Club is the latest graphic novel from writer Richard Ashley Hamilton, who has worked on previous books for Dark Horse and DC Comics. It’s the first collaboration between Hamilton and artist Marco Matrone, and the first AfterShock work for either creator, though the latest in a long line of work for letterer Dave Sharpe.
In a statement announcing the new graphic novel, Hamilton described what Fearbook Club is about, and what he hopes young readers take away from the book:
“Our story is about fear and how today’s kids — kids like my sons — are growing up saturated in it. Fear follows them everywhere, in their devices, in social media, in their parents’ dinner table conversations.
We grown-ups are lucky because we get to sublimate our fears whenever we see scary movies or read horror books that speak directly to us as adults. Kids don’t quite have that same opportunity. My hope is thatFearbook Clubgives them a way to safely process their fears in fiction that is both about them and for them.
That’s the main reason I’m excited for readers to experience our book. The second is thatFearbook Clubactually started out as a campfire story I told my boys one Friday the 13th. It gave them the worst nightmares ever. I am now very much looking forward to traumatizing other people’s children, too.”
Check out a 10-page preview of interiors from Fearbook Club below. The 112-page middle grade graphic novel is due out in comic shops on Wednesday, January 5th, 2022, and everywhere on Tuesday, January 18th, 2022.
