While the coming of spring has sapped all remnants of cold in the air, there’s always room for comics set deep within the clutches of autumn leaves. The autumn leaves we’re looking at, however, are an extension of the town of Comfort Notch, nestled in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire. While New England has proven fertile ground for horror, Daniel Kraus, Chris Shehan, Jason Wordie, and Jim Campbell give us a more folk-tinged look at the terrors lurking in the woods with their series, The Autumnal.

Kat Sommerville never knew her mother very well—she was sent to live with relatives at nine years old while her mother stayed in Comfort Notch. More than anything, she wants to be the kind of mother to her own daughter, Sybil, that she never had. But this is difficult when the world doesn’t want to be kind to her. It does show a kind of kindness, however, when Kat’s mother dies and leaves her their family home in Comfort Notch. It’s an idyllic town, which of course means it’s harboring some kind of awful secret in its past as, once people learn Kat’s surname, they begin seeing her in a different light. Trying to find something concrete about the town’s history only leaders to stonewalling and veiled threats until the autumnal equinox. It’s here that their history comes into light—the child born from the forest, the deal made with the woods for its trees, and the blood of the children that it asks for every few years to keep it content.

After being born in Comfort Notch, Kat does remember some of these aspects of the town, but her memories are fuzzy—much in the same way the panels are for this series. While each pages does mostly follow standard panel grids, it’s their edges that stand out. They’re sketchy at times—ill-defined as though they’d been rubbed away by years of fingering past them in a stack of photos. More than anything, they help to reinforce the idea of the waxing and waning of Kat’s memories. Even when she begins to remember or learn something of the town, those edges remain, signaling that she never really does have the complete picture. Even the final panels of the series begin to fill out with more negative space, as though the bleed itself is looking to wipe out what she knows about Comfort Notch. 

Kraus, Shehan, Wordie, and Campbell make us feel a certain terror at just a pile of leaves. There’s something so innocuous about a leaf, but giving it a weight and presence as if it were the eyes of some great terror peering in on you makes them unsettling. And with those leaves feeling as though they’re slowly burying the people trying to learn more about why Comfort Notch loses so many children over the years, it only makes The Autumnal feel all the more like the kind of folk horror you would normally see on deserted Scottish islands with burning human effigies. 

Get excited. Get raking.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.