In honor of the graphic novel’s release we have an exclusive essay from Szyman about why he created a graphic novel about alien abductions. Little Visitor & Other Abductions Abductions lands in stores today on September 23. You can get your copy from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local comic shop or bookstore.
It’s still a bit of a mystery to me why I’ve written and drawn a graphic novel about alien abductions. My book, LITTLE VISITOR & OTHER ABDUCTIONS, is a collection of three thematically linked stories, and I’m sure most would assume that it was an impassioned belief in the reality of UFOs and alien phenomena that led me to make it. The truth is while I believe alien life exists in the cosmos I’m fairly agnostic about the notion that they have actually visited and interacted with human beings. I’m open to it, and would like to know more, but for now I’m on the fence. Why, then, would I spend years making this book?
When I think about alien abductions I think about the television in my parent’s bedroom, the one my brother and I retreated to when Mom and Dad were watching something too boring to tolerate. We’d channel surf, usually landing on some cartoon or sitcom rerun but just as often arriving at something we felt we shouldn’t be watching. Something our parents might not have forbade per se, but the kind of thing for which there was a dangerous allure granted to it in the absence of explicit permission.
I grew up in the 1990s and first became drawn to horror just at the height of UFOs and other paranormal phenomena’s ascendancy in the cultural zeitgeist. Unsolved Mysteries, Beyond Fact and Fiction, and (of course) The X-Files were everywhere, and you could hardly turn on the television after 9 PM without coming across this or that “documentary” special about UFO sightings and alien abduction, rife with endearingly cheesy reenactments of ostensibly genuine paranormal encounters.
When I use the word cheesy that’s purely in retrospect; at the time these shows had a real power to me, a sinister sense that I was discovering some forbidden truth, the mere knowledge of which might somehow put me at risk, draw eyes to me, or bring me out of my world and into another.
It was these kinds of documentaries that I remember nervously watching upstairs in my parent’s bedroom. You would think that for two boys allowed to watch R-rated films there would be no tension there, but perhaps it was those very reenactments that lent them some forbidden mystique. The idea, as it was presented, that these stories were rooted in the real, were actual lived experiences, made it feel so much more frightening, tangible, and obscene to my young mind. They were granted even more power in their juxtaposition with the verifiably real crimes that were also presented on shows like Unsolved Mysteries. How could this UFO encounter be anything less than real when five minutes ago the same narrator was talking about a murder that I could read about in the newspaper?
When people talk about memories of horror films they watched when they were young you often hear them say, “I had nightmares for days.” The only time this really happened for me was from watching one of these documentary shows. As I recall the first segment was about a real life crime where a family was murdered by an intruder, and a little girl survived having her throat cut by the killer and managed to get help from a neighbor. The second segment was a reenactment of an alien abduction. I only remember a few details about this person’s encounter: flickering lights in their bedroom, gray shapes sliding in, and then the victim awakening in The Ship.
I’m sure if I could find and rewatch that scene now it wouldn’t scare me in the slightest, but at the time I was well and truly terrified and spent the next few nights in fear. The two segments swirled together in my mind: the first a viscerally true and grisly crime, and the other eerily speculative and supernatural. They became one hideous thing which gnawed at me night after night.
This was an era when conspiracy theories were by and large disconnected from the kind of hateful bile that too often comes pre-packaged with them today. From our vantage point in the 2020s, when you can’t lift up a conspiratorial rock without finding a teeming mass of white nationalist bugs wriggling beneath it, it’s hard to believe there was a time when these kinds of things were not only compelling to the skeptic and believer alike but oddly charming.
It’s curious to consider what led this kind of material to become so ubiquitous in the 1990s. UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle were seemingly on everyone’s lips. Perhaps it was a displacement of Cold War paranoia, left rudderless and vestigial after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Combine that with a more than understandable mistrust of the United States government in the wake of Watergate, the JFK assassination, and Vietnam and it starts to make a lot of sense. The generation whose bucolic image of America was repeatedly stepped on and shattered by these events would naturally become skeptical of The Narrative, and so it’s hardly surprising that once they had the reins of popular culture they would embrace those ideas.
But for me, a young viewer unaware of any of the historical context which might explain the popularity of those shows or the fringe theories they espoused, they made the world feel strange and large and full of cracks, crevices, and corners that I had never known were there.
In the 1990s conspiracy theory culture felt as if it came from a righteous pursuit of truth in the face of an overwhelming campaign of manipulation and obfuscation spearheaded from the highest echelons of power. Now there is a different feeling, one where the pursuit of this supposed truth might itself be part of the manipulation. Many of our conspiracy theories now feel curated and cultivated by some other force who wants to use that desire for The Truth as a means to implant a different narrative which is no less useful to the halls of power than the one we sought to shed ourselves of in the first place. Peel back the curtain and all you’ll find is a hall of mirrors.
It is comforting, then, that as UFOs (now known as UAPs) find root in the zeitgeist once again the culture around them feels largely divorced from that poisoned world. It intersects with it in many ways and places, as does every piece of our culture now, but the core tenet of that community and pursuit appears still to simply be a desire for A Truth which is being withheld.
As a child watching these shows was the first time I was introduced to the notion that there was anything hidden at all to the world, or that the truth was something you could pick at. It’s no surprise that I was startled by this revelation, and terrified by the idea that I could be taken by something entering my home, something I couldn’t reason with, something bearing none of the empathy or emotion I associate with humanity, something that might take me somewhere I would never return from. It’s no surprise, then, that as an adult I would write the book I did.
What is surprising, though, is that we see other kinds of abductions every day now. Other disappearings of innocent people. In the 1990s being abducted was something that happened in the shadows, on the fringes. Something spoken of as rumor and speculation. Something that could only be explained in supernatural terms, and within the 4:3 boundaries of primetime television.
Now it’s happening in daylight and it’s happening everywhere. It’s happening right outside your door. You don’t need to ask yourself whether you believe in it. Pull back your curtains and look it in the eye.
-Adam Szym
