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(CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | DREW EDWARDS) Comic book author Drew Edwards poses at a booth of his work. Edwards grew up in Graham and got his passion for comics from the many comics he read at the Library of Graham. -
(CONTRIBUTED PHOTO | DREW EDWARDS) Issues of Halloween Man by Drew Edwards, who grew up in Graham. Edwards has been able to launch his career into comics.
The small-town life of Graham was enough to inspire the imagination of author Drew Edwards, creator of the horror comic series Halloween Man. With over 20 years of self-publishing experience, Edwards built his career in the comic industry.
Edwards, now living in Austin, said while growing up in Graham he would ride his bike to the library when it was located as part of Shawnee Elementary School to read hard-bound copies of comic books from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He would spend hours pouring over the comic books and later determined that was the path for his life.
“Growing up in an area like Graham (...) some people don’t realize that that’s a really good way to foster a kid’s imagination. I already had started telling stories to my brothers, to the other kids. I’d make up stuff about the Bluffs, Possum Kingdom, the surrounding areas, about monsters and things like that. It was just this tapestry that I was really just allowed to let my imagination run wild and fill everything up with sort of my own personal mythology,” he said. “Now when I got to be a teenager and they constructed the new library, that library was really an escape for me. (...) I didn’t exactly fit in. I wasn’t a jock or anything, but I could go there, I could read books, I could bring my friends and we would play Dungeons and Dragons there, things of that nature. It just was this wonderful place that really helped my love of writing and my imagination just continue to develop.”
His love of horror began when his father showed him the 1954 black-and-white science fiction monster movie Them. Edwards’ father also took him to the Graham drive-in theater to see monster movies and he also rented horror movies with his friends.
“We would try to scare the heck out of each other on the weekends. We’d stay up really late watching monster movies,” he said. “The way this sort of tied into what I ended up doing is when watching a lot of monster movies (...) a lot of the times you end up having empathy for the monster. A really good monster movie tends to do that. When I started coming up with superhero characters of my own, I really wanted to do a story where the monster was the good guy and a monster got the girl instead of being killed at the end. He would continue to have adventures. That’s really where Halloween Man came from.”
For the full story, see the Saturday, Dec. 17 edition of The Graham Leader.
