Ahoy Comics and its editor-in-chief Tom Peyer are now on their third year of publishing a comic that stars a drunk and angry Edgar Allan Poe.

For the past two years, the book was called Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter of Terror, the second volume of which is out in bookstores this week. In addition, later this month will mark the start of a third season for this concept with a new name — Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter of Blood. And today Peyer was kind enough to talk all things Poe with The Beat.

Check out our conversation with Peyer below!

Tom Peyer Interview

ZACK QUAINTANCE: Aside from Drunken Poe, what will readers of past volumes find familiar about this new season? What might be entirely new or different?
TOM PEYER: We’re still here to roast Poe, who is still drunk and angry. The biggest difference is the title: it’s now EDGAR ALLAN POE’S SNIFTER OF BLOOD. Anything for a new #1. That’s good marketing, right? It’s still 1991, right?
One new thing is, we have a couple of stories in black-and-white. Because I love old black-and-white comics, and old black-and-white horror movies. Sorry, colorists! I love you, too! It’s just a couple of stories. Really.
QUAINTANCE: Bless the public domain for letting us have nice things like these “parody/desecration” Poe comics. I’m curious, have you ever heard from Poe scholars or anyone else with a strong stake in the writer’s legacy, and if so, what has their reaction to the books been?
PEYER: There’s an ardent Poe fan here in Syracuse who threatened to hit me, but it turned out he was kidding. As for Poe scholars, they’re apparently behind in their comic book reading. We haven’t been scolded, but we’d like to be. So much so that we arranged for Michael Lutz, an academic who knows how to write funny, to provide the introduction to SNIFTER Vol. 1 in the guise of Giden M. Screech, a made-up Poe scholar who hates the comic.
QUAINTANCE: So, I’m one of the presumably many folks who really enjoys the cereal mascot stories. What makes children’s breakfast marketing so wonderfully rich for repurposing into niche horror comics anthology material?
PEYER: All breakfast cereals for children are horrific. They’re our first encounter with poison. They hurt our bodies and make us want them. That’s how they prepare us for adult life.
QUAINTANCE: The second season trade paperback seems to have a good bit of additional non-comics material in it, more than a dozen pieces. What can you tell us about some of the bonus material we’ll find in there?
PEYER: Oh, we have poems, short stories, humor pieces. All of AHOY’s monthlies have backmatter that makes them feel like magazines. These are rarely reprinted in our collected editions, but we made an exception for the first two volumes of POE’S SNIFTER. It’s the only title we publish that really runs on literary pretention and insecurity.
QUAINTANCE: Finally, are there any other public domain-friendly writers Ahoy would like to apply the parody/desecration treatment too, perhaps with an alcoholic or seasonal lens as well?
PEYER: There are a lot of great, affordable, and dead writers; the trouble is, very few have likenesses as immediately recognizable as Poe’s. Shakespeare. Karl Marx. Maybe Oscar Wilde. Who else?

 

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.