Interviews 

Music Meets Comics Meets Horror: Ben Goldsmith on “The Seance Room” Kickstarter

By | October 30th, 2018
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

Music and comics like to go hand in hand lately, like peas and carrots. It’s not a partnership that one often expects, but when done right, enhances the reader’s visual and audio experiences. Comics creators have dipped their toes into musical pursuits (think Max Bemis) and the music industry has dipped its toe into the comics world, such as Jeff Rougvie’s new Image series “Gunning for Hits.” Music inspires stories, such as Wayne Shorter’s graphic novel companion to his album Emanon. And of course, stories inspire music. Just in time for Halloween, Source Point Press’s horror comic “The Séance Room” launched a Kickstarter to fund a concept album on vinyl based on the series, and I chatted with series writer and musician Ben Goldsmith about both.

Check out the Kickstarter and if you’re so inclined to donate, you can do so before November 11th – – there are some pretty cool reward tiers with possibly more to come.

Pitch to me the premise of “The Séance Room.”

The Séance Room

Ben Goldsmith: The pitch for “The Séance Room” – – and this is the down the middle, every convention pitch that I can do in my sleep while I’m thinking about taxes and food – – is that there is a  gentleman, Henry Weiss, who owns a mansion, and inside of that mansion, there were six ghosts. Each issue, someone goes in, one of those ghosts comes to life and forces the person to face a fear or secret they’ve been trying to hide or run from. Each issue is a complete story front to back, hand painted, digitally finished by Keyla Valerio.

What gave you the idea to extend the world of “The Séance Room” past the printed page and come up with a concept album for this comic?

BG: Well, I was a musician for way longer than I’ve been a comic book writer or enthusiast or anything. The actual form itself was pretty easy to transfer over and I have a friend, Pat McCann, who plays in the Brothers McCann, who’s this incredible touring act. I’ve wanted to work with him for as long as I can remember. I love him, I love what he does. We both kinda came from very strong musical backgrounds and so creating worlds through music was really easy to us  – – it was like a second language. I look at Disney World as being one of the most wonderful places to go to. All politics aside or all work relations aside with the company, when you go to Disney World, everything is inclusive. You are so embedded in the world and they do absolutely everything they can to block out the rays of reality. That’s the approach that I’d always wanted to take with anything that I work on. Even the website itself is a website that looks like a real place called Weiss Manor and you can go visit it. It’s like down to every bone, I wanted to start to create a world that blocked out the rays of reality.

Is this concept album more of an extension of the current stories that are out there or perhaps just a new interpretation of what’s already been published?

BG: I’d say the first. It is just the sounds of “The Séance Room,” so to speak. You could play it and read any issue and it wouldn’t matter. Even with the issues, we sort of tried to do this where you don’t have to read them in order, you don’t have to read them back to back, you don’t have to read them in any way that you don’t want to. It’s fun that way, and I think this album fits into that. We put it together so that the first opening song is a six minute long musical introduction where you actually are escorted from entering the house, up to the room, to the spinner where the ghosts are kept, and to touch the spinner, and release the demons. And then there is one song for each ghost. There’s no specific story per se, it could take place at any time and any way, There’s so many times where as a reader you go back to something and you go, “Oh, this is of a time,” or, “This is of a thing,” so we’re just trying not to regret the things we did today 10 years later.

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What can listeners expect with this album in terms of musical styles, musical influences? In other interviews you’ve described it as a little bit like Pink Floyd, and I’ve picked up a little bit of Moody Blues as well.

BG: Yeah, I think that that’s a fair assessment. The pairing down that I’ve gotten that works the best is Pink Floyd if Pink Floyd was to arrange an album for a horror movie. Like Suspiria or Fantasm or Creep Show and Pink Floyd was at the helm.

I also got a little bit of Radiohead going on when I listened to a couple of the clips that you’ve played.

BG: Yeah, I love Radiohead a lot. I sort of shy away from it just because you can say Pink Floyd and everyone goes, “Yeah!”  And you say Radiohead and about 50% of the people go, “Oh, too pretentious for me.” Even if realistically, they’re listening to the same things when they listen to Pink Floyd. And I’ve actually been listening to a lot of Goblin lately. Goblin was a British act that they wrote the music to a lot 1970’s horror movies, and I think they sort of established the sound of horror movies for generations. When we went into it, we had one operative word and that word was minor. It has to feel like it’s in a minor key.

The whole thing’s not in minor by any means. The sound is like bright and effervescent and that slowly decays to this like lucid drunk dream of music that is in minor – – as if minor really was always winning the battle and major had these moments of success but never to any real great fanfare. And that’s all just part of the visualizing music to keep it something that is aligned with a visual medium like a comic book, that we still wanted it to feel like a story when you’re listening to it. We worked really hard to make sure that it was essentially the comic book equivalent of music, if we can make such a grandiose claim.

Your collaborator on this, Pat McCann, really shows his versatility. If you listen to his regular stuff, it’s a little more folk, a little more indie, and this is, as you said, very much minor key, very much Pink Floyd, very prog-rock.

BG: When you listen to his stuff, there’s nothing about it that feels plain. They’re always doing something a little more. And that’s just your standard pop, folk, kind of more mainstream type of thing, and even at that, they couldn’t just be cool with the ordinary.  I knew Pat was gonna be perfect to work on this with and we really knocked it out very quickly. There was a lot of like, he would lock something in and I know when he was really feeling something – – you just know with a person you’ve known that long, you know, you trust them. There are certain things like “Love and Power”  was sort of his brain child and I just stepped back from it and said. “Okay. I trust you. I trust what you’re doing. I think that there’s something here and I don’t wanna get in the way of that.” Come hell or high water, success or failure of the album, the best thing that I got to do was work with a friend of mine who I admire and love and musically worship.

Let’s talk about some of the rewards people get when they back the Kickstarter. Obviously one of them is going to be the album in some form, whether it’s physical or digital media, but you’ve got a few other interesting things up there.

BG: There’s a 1 in 50 print, a lithograph print of a brand new Harry Weiss with demon print that Keyla Valerio did that you can only get through the Kickstarter. You can get a t-shirt, which is made to be as if it is the Weiss Manor staff t-shirt. Once again, it’s part of that inclusive element, that build-the-world element, so we said “let’s make a t-shirt as if you were the actual staff at the Weiss Manor.” Even on the CD, we included demos, original, me and Pat in the basement demos, and full audio commentary of us discussing the songs while we listen to it. So even if you just get the CD and you don’t get the vinyl, you’re getting really cool stuff in there as well. And then there’s the original lyrics. The big one, the really big one is a party, which no one has done yet.

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Back to the comic now. There’s two issues out now, and these are self-contained stories. Are there plans to make this a more ongoing world, maybe stories of the ghosts that inhabit the Séance Room, the daily interactions with the staff, for example?

BG: Yeah. As it goes on, you will be able to piece certain things together. The beginning of the second [issue] is actually a continuation of one that we’re doing down the road. The way we set it up was this: you’re gonna get so much more out of reading all of them, but you don’t need to. That was the big plan, was that you can get a better sense of who the ghosts are, of their history. People tend to perseverate unnecessary details and lose the fact that it’s not a part of the story. If you think about even the way we live our lives, we have a goal in any given moment and we will essentially ignore anything that doesn’t have to do with that goal. So if I say that this issue is about a woman who brings her ashes of her husband to the Séance Room to find an urn, that’s her goal and where the ghosts come from really doesn’t matter. It just muddies things, sometimes. I’ll be reading something and the writer clearly has gotten very focused on details that are not the main story, but little side avenues that don’t go anywhere and you’re only gonna have to go backwards to get back to the main story. So I have mixed feelings about giving the ghosts real back stories. Obviously we’ve talked about it, obviously we have sort of strong feelings about who they are and where they came from, how they got to the mansion, more importantly. I think that’s the big one everyone wants to know, is how they got into the mansion. And we have ’em, but I really am not convinced that we need to share those.

I don’t know if you’ve read the Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books, but some of the editing is just so poor and it’s exactly what you described: a focus on details that you really don’t need to know. To me, that’s just piss-poor editing.

BG: It comes from the school of though where detail gives story, and I am of the school of thought that moments give story. A moment is huge, a detail can be forgotten. And realistically, when you ask someone to remember an event, for the most part the details are the fuzziest and the first things to go and the moments are the things that stay with us. And if we do remember a moment, it’s only because it was so indelibly tied in to the event. I come from a theater background, so it was always about the character decisions and past. At the end of the day, no one really gave a shit what Boo Radley ate for breakfast the day before, you know? ‘Cause who fucking cares what he ate for breakfast the day before the events of [To Kill a Mockingbird]? .As they go on you will see interactions between the different ghosts and between the conductor who is the essentially Harry’s number two, who keeps things orderly. You’ll see a lot of that, but it never comes at the expense of the story we are trying to tell in each issue.

The other star of this show is Keyla Valerio’s art. It is stunning, and that word alone doesn’t even begin to cover it. How did you find her as your artist?

BG: I was going to conventions before I was with Source Point, before I was anything. And Keyla had a booth with a friend and I was just really trying to push myself to go out and do the things I didn’t want to do: step out of my own discomfort and go to conventions and introduce myself and meet artists and essentially do the hard part, which is trying to get your foot in the door. I met Keyla at Special Edition in New York during one of the couple years they did it, which is still one of my favorite conventions. I noticed a Catwoman print that she had done in black and white, and it was so stunning. And I actually am looking at that, I had that print framed and I’m looking at it right now. I still have it hung up. When I saw her art I knew that I liked it.

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When I finally weaseled my way into a company, which was Source Point, they gave me a deal and I asked Keyla if she wanted to be on board. For me it was very exciting, to call up someone like Keyla and say, “here’s an opportunity for you to show off your artwork to the world in a way that you haven’t been able to before.”  And she had never done sequentials before – – so in issue #1 you’re watching Keyla Valerio do sequentials for the very first time, which is pretty remarkable. It’s like when you see the guy who is clearly dating above his number – – like when you see a five with a nine. That’s how I felt with Kayla. It’s like I’m the five and she’s the nine. And I hope she doesn’t figure it out before the comic book is done. But I think it’s worked out really well for her. I think she’s gotten a lot of attention from Marvel to do cover work. I know she’s gotten work doing album covers and stuff like that from these things. The only unfortunate thing is I guess she’s actually leaving after issue #4.

Normally in the comics process you do your script and the art sort of follows. Has there ever been artwork that Kayla’s done that maybe actually influenced or you changed some of your script?

BG: I wish I could say yes, but most of them were done by the time Kayla was really on board. I’m pretty quick, and I’ll get things done early so that I don’t stress out about them later.

How did you find Source Point Press?

BG: I went to Boston Comic Con one year and they were there.  Actually this [story] is really neat because usually you can’t trace success. You just work really hard and then eventually something happens. But it was neat because I submitted my work to this online, I guess review. And it came back and they ripped it to shreds, absolutely hated it, didn’t even bother finishing the script. Really just like the thickest biggest daggers you could possibly have stabbed in your heart. They were at New York Comic Con one year and I just went and I’m like, “Swallow your pride, go, figure out what you can learn from the experience, all that good stuff.”

The editor in chief was like, “Yeah, you know, Joe Mulvey,” who is this artist who is incredible, “he has this online following and it helps out a lot.” I didn’t have Instagram really and I wasn’t using Facebook for any of this stuff.  I was like, “All right, I guess I gotta set up an online presence for these things and start friending the right people and following the people…” – – just all that sort of networking thing that it’s tough to start but sort of is important. So I did. I went online, started searching people, and I just started searching different artists that I liked. And I came across this guy, Sean Seal, who does the art for “Norah” and for “The Rot” for Source Point Press – – he does a painter style art.  And I remember loving the work so much. And then at Boston Comic Con one year, he was there. And I had no idea who Source Point Press was, I had no idea of anything – – all I knew is I liked Sean’s work. So, I go up and I’m like, “Sean, you’re Sean.” And Sean is like not that outgoing. He’s really nice, but he’s not an outgoing person by nature. But he was sort of just shocked that anyone knew who he was. And then he introduced me to a big red bearded fellow to his right who ended up being Travis McIntire, the editor in chief. I said, “Travis, well are you guys looking for new stuff?” And he’s like, “Well, not really.” And I said, “Well, will you be looking for stuff later?” And I think I sort of just wore him down.

My favorite thing is he then emails me, “All right, give me nine pitches.” So I sent him nine pitches. And then he said, “All right, well these three.” And then finally they whittled it down to “The Seance Room.” And then I find out from Travis later, like years later – – after Source Point had taken off – – he’s like, “Hey, you know I only did that just to see if you’d do it, right?” I was like, “What?” He said, “Yeah. I just wanted to see if you’d do that stuff.”

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So, the point is that I can trace everything back to that one moment of heartbreak and pushing through it and saying, “What can I learn from it?” And what I learned is to build the online thing, follow people that I liked, and then the rest is history.

And you’ve gotta hustle. Biggest lesson I learned from one of my actor friends is you’ve gotta hustle.

BG: When you’re where you’re supposed to be in life, the hustle doesn’t feel like the hustle. It’s exhausting, but it’s also energizing at the same time.

There’s two issues out of “The Séance Room.” You’ve hinted that there are at least two more. When can we expect the rest of these stories?

BG: The last two of Kayla’s run should be out by next year.  I don’t have a timeline unfortunately yet on those.

But some time next year we’ll have the last two of her stories and then you’ve got . . . two more it sounds like? Because there are six ghosts.

BG: Potentially, realistically – – four more. So eight for the first run. I have 15 written and 12 of them are .  . . good. So there’s a lot of stuff to be told. But Dustin is actually working on his issues right now. So once Kayla’s are finished they’ll come faster too, which is really nice.

I know you’re a writer for several publishers. I know the Kickstarter is taking up a great deal of your time, but are there any other books or music projects we can expect from you in the near future that aren’t connected to “The Séance Room?”

BG: Oh my God, are there other things besides “The Séance Room?” It doesn’t feel that way right now. At the end of summer of next year I have a book coming out with Mad Cave [Studios] called “RV9.” And that is a book about nine assassins who work for the most powerful organization in the world and one assassin who decided that she didn’t want to be a part of it any more. We sort of went for the throat of love and misplaced love and using love as a bargaining tool, and a mechanism for getting people to do what you want in the world of assassins. Once again, it’s not about the details, it’s about the moments. We wanted to see what we could do where instead of focusing on all of the same old same old, “Oh, this guy, he’s the best with knives,” or like, “Oh, this person, he’s the real behind the scenes tech guy.” We didn’t want any part of that. What we wanted to do is we wanted to say, “Everyone has motivation and most people’s motivation here is a sense of worth – – how is your sense of worth measured up when viewed through the lens of a father figure or a friend?”

Anything else you want fans to know or readers to know about the Kickstarter or “The Séance Room?”

BG:: Get it?

Ben, thanks so much.


The first two issues of “The Séance Room” are available on Comixology, and the Kickstarter for “The Séance Room: The Concept Album” ends on November 11th.


Kate Kosturski

Kate Kosturski is your Multiversity social media manager, a librarian by day and a comics geek...well, by day too (and by night). Kate's writing has also been featured at PanelxPanel, Women Write About Comics, and Geeks OUT. She spends her free time spending too much money on Funko POP figures and LEGO, playing with yarn, and rooting for the hapless New York Mets. Follow her on Twitter at @librarian_kate.

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