Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Laura Muller, Nenetl, Vera Greentea

Vera Greentea Talks Nenetl Of The Forgotten Spirits

Alasdair Stuart writes;

Vera Greentea's Papa is one of my comics of the year. It's a really smart, bleak, beautiful trio of stories about fatherhood that runs the gamut from horror to SF. I was, and still am, very fond of it. Vera's closing in on the end of a kickstarter for issue 2 of Nenetl of the Forgotten Spirits with Laura Muller on art duties. I talked to Vera about the project, dark comedy and the Aztecs.

Tell us a little about the project.

Nenetl of the Forgotten Spirits is a 4-part comic miniseries that focuses on a young spirit girl who is searching the streets of Mexico for her family during the festival of the Day of the Dead. Each of the four parts introduces one of the four exorcists – each exorcist desires to capture her, each for a different reason.
The four comics are all written and produced by myself, and will be illustrated beautifully by Laura Müller. We are inviting anyone to check out the project – anyone who loves the softer side of horror; the cheery eeriness, the unsettling oddness of a dark fantasy story that I hope would be accessible to both kids and adults.

BC: Why do you think dark comedy is so particular around Halloween?

VERA: Comedy is something that plugs you into the collective, even when you're watching/reading it by yourself, you relate to the situation because it tends to mock something we all know. Horror, on the other hand, is isolating. Even when you watch it with 100 people in a theater, the fear feels very personal. But when you combine the two into a dark comedy, it allows even the biggest scaredy-cats to warmly share the stark and raw feelings of fear and laugh at themselves and each other.

It's a delicious sensation to share laughter, and what's better to share during Halloween than fear? Halloween is hard to resist!

BC:What led you to the Aztecs as background?

VERA: Originally, I was deeply enthralled by the Mexican and more contemporary version of the festival of the Day of the Dead. I kept some of the Catholic aspects (like the church and the idea of exorcisms), since it's hard to ignore that the Día de Muertos had merged with the theology of the conquering Spaniards over five hundred years ago.
As I learned more about it, I realized that I didn't want to completely eschew the origin of the tradition, and wanted to invoke the incredible strangeness and beauty of its beginnings by emphasizing the Aztec aspects as well; the iconography of the skull, Nenetl's name, and the deeply fascinating idea about the kind of life after death Aztec spiritualism teaches us to embrace and give into. Honestly, it's much too fascinating to want to give anything up – for better or worse, the ritual became richly layered over the centuries.

BC: What's next for you, Laura and Nenetl?

VERA: Laura and I will be concentrating hard all of this year and next on finishing the rest of the series. We have yet to discuss if we will be working on anything else afterwards, but I wouldn't rule it out – I deeply adore working with her. We have a very similar aesthetic and tend to love the same type of stuff. Each of us has multiple projects that we're working on, but I like to believe that we'll end up together on future projects.

Nenetl of the Forgotted Spirits closes on Kickstarter in 60 hours. You can find more of Vera's work, and you really should, at her blog.

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