Afraid of Everything: A Friday Comic Friday Extra!

When you are going through an alphabet of fears, that means you have 26 different traumas to face. Take a look at terror from A-Z as we look at Afraid of Everything in this Family Comic Friday Extra!

Afraid of Everything: An Alphabetic Compendium of People's Weirdest FearsWritten by Adam Tierney
Illustrated by Mattheu Cousin
Published by IDW Publshing
Pages: 98
Retail: $19.99

Parents and Guardians, remember Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? Remember how those stories creeped you out. But you couldn't stop yourself from turning the page for another freaky chapter?  Writer Adam Tierney hopes to capture that feeling and bottle it up in his new book Afraid of Everything.  

Tierney wrote the book for his 8-year old son, Django using Scary Stories as inspiration. After his son fell in love with the stories so much, the author decided to publish them for kids and their families to enjoy.

For the most part, the stories do capture that old school horror feel. As with Scary Stories, a couple of chapters end kinda silly. It's always good to have some stories end in a weird way as it keeps things fresh and unexpected. Adam Tierney also does some really cool experimentation with fonts as well as shapes in some of his stories, like his slithering poem about ophidiophobia (fear of snakes). However, I felt that the artwork wasn't quite so invoking of those established classic creeps.

Afraid of Everything isn't a typical graphic novel. Each one-page short story is paired with an image illustrated by Mattheu Cousin. His artwork is rather cartoony.  It's nowhere near as nightmare inducing as that of original Scary Stories artist Stephen Gammell. However, a couple of images, especially the one for 'E is for  Electrophobia', was rather provocative for a book aimed at readers 8-11.

This book also has 11 bonus stories with art by an assortment of guest artists including Studio Yotta's Temmie Chang, Alex Ahad (Skullgirls) and Lindsay Collins. I think Adam Tierney should have used an assortment of various artists instead of just one. Plus, going black and white instead of full color invokes that classic horror feel much better than the pastel purples, pinks and blues used by Cousin.

Full of bite-sized reads, Afraid of Everything is not book that requires a lot of commitment. Readers have frequent chances to disconnect from the book if things get too scary as all of the tales are only a page in length. The artwork and coloring is uneven. But the bonus material is classic. A good read for those who just can't wait until Halloween for a scare!
Afraid of Everything: An Alphabetic Compendium of People's Weirdest Fears is currently available in print and other digital formats.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.

This review was concurrently published on Outrightgeekery.com.