Daniel Noah Is Making It Weird In Oni’s New ‘High Strangeness’ Series

As a writer, producer and director of films and podcasts, Daniel Noah always enjoys telling good ghost stories. But he’s taking the supernatural extremely seriously in High Strangeness, a new deluxe graphic series coming this October from edgy independent publisher Oni Press.

Noah is co-founder (with Elijah Wood and Lawrence Inglee) of SpectreVision, the production company known for films like Mandy and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which is collaborating with Oni on the publication. For most of his life, he described himself as a hardcore skeptic when it came to the occult. Then a night in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (the haunted hotel that inspired The Shining) left him questioning whether there was more to reality than meets the eye.

“Our last night there, a group of folks gathered in the room with the Ouija board, which I regarded as a child’s game. I was not happy to be doing it,” Noah recounted in an interview last week. “Then something happened that was so undeniable that my only options were to believe that my friends had spent half a million dollars concocting an unlikely prank, or that we’d had a genuine encounter with a ghost.”

Following that experience, Noah began examining the lore of the unexplained with a new eye, eventually coming to believe that a whole range of phenomena from UFO encounters to hauntings to the original, super-creepy Men in Black, were all manifestations of the same set of real experiences people were having all over the world, dressed up in the guise of fiction and folklore.

Noah found a kindred spirit in Oni Press Publisher Hunter Gorinson, who encouraged him to develop the idea for comics. “We want to make this as spectacular and entertaining and beautifully complex as possible,” said Gorinson. “We’re doing this five-issue series in a high quality format with no ads and a ton of expert back-matter to expand on the nonfiction element.”

Noah is serving as “showrunner” of the series, working with a creative team including writer Chris Condon (Ultimate Wolverine, The Goddamn Tragedy) and Ringo Award-winning artist Dave Chisholm (Plague House); writer Zac Thompson (Cemetery Kids Run Rabid) and artist Noah Bailey (Station Grand, Double Walker); Eisner Award nominee Christopher Cantwell (Out of Alcatraz, Thanos) and artist Valeria Burzo (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss); New York Times best-selling writer Cecil Castellucci (Shade the Changing Girl) and artist Chloe Stawski (Sapphic Pulp); and multiple Eisner Award winner Christian Ward (Batman: City of Madness). Senior editor Bess Pallares is overseeing the project on Oni’s end.

Noah said he is excited to work in the comics medium for the first time. “I’ve worked in every aspect of media, but comics are new to me,” he said. “I’ve never experienced this much support for free creative expression anywhere. Nothing has come close. I also feel a great sense of responsibility because that these guys are supporting some really crazy stuff, you know, not just in the content, but even in the way that the story is told.”

While stories that blend the line between supernatural fiction and reality are nothing new in comics, Gorinson said High Strangeness is honoring the ambiguity of the material by challenging the reader rather than providing easy answers. He also said that, despite collaborating with a company like SpectreVision, which produces projects across different media, the books will adhere to Oni’s primary mission of delivering good comics, without an eye toward a bigger media footprint.

Attendees of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con can get a preview of what’s in store for High Strangeness during a live recording of the SpectreVision podcast Saturday, July 26 at the Neil Morgan Auditorium in the San Diego Central Library. Gorinson, Pallares, and writers Chris Cantwell and Chris Condon will join Noah, Elijah Wood and host Jim Perry for what the company describes as a “a wide-ranging, investigative conversation a will surveil the liminal spaces where reality, hallucination, science and mythology give way to cosmic wonder and existential terror.”

HIGH STRANGENESS: BOOK ONE – 1967 arrives in comic shops on October 8th with a covers by Jock (Wytches, Detective Comics), Dave Chisholm (Spectrum), Becca Carey (Benjamin, Radiant Black), and Malachi Ward (Black Hammer).