You’re sure to beat your socks to do bad things. This True Crime – Giaro Horror Series is the latest comic from acclaimed creator Tyler Boss who works with the incredibly talented Adriano Taturicz. It’s a complete joy for genre fans and those who are more familiar with it. With territory. Both creators have excellent works in the series, with their debut issue arriving on March 26, 2025 from Image Comics and are currently available for pre-order. Beat sat down with writer Tyler boss to discuss creating the series, giving readers insight into what to expect.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Adriano Turtulici Artwork
Jared Bird: What influenced the concept of doing something bad?
Tyler’s Boss: It started out like the main obstacles our main character, Seth, faces. I wanted to write a story of romance. I was watching Charles Burns mini comics. There he was doing a faux-clomance cover mixed with his usual body horror, thinking how well the horror-romance pair was going on. After that I was driving to Matthew Rosenberg, Joshua Hixon and Annapolis third-eyed comics. Josh fell in love with one of Matthew’s pitches more, but he couldn’t get this one storyline out of his head. That was the kernel of doing bad things. I played around when I found time and thought that one day I would draw it. Then one day I was sitting in my hotel room at Comic-Con in San Diego, scrolling through Instagram. I saw Michael Walsh sharing an illustration of Ian Curtis from the Joy division. One of my favourite musicians was the subject matter, the quality of the art. That was “it.” What makes the book work. I reached out to Adriano and then I really started building.
Byrd: What was it like working with Adriano Taturicz?
Boss: In short, it was a dream. You can see it all on the page, he just got it. He is considered a cartoonist and thought on the page in a way that could be overlooked. Often, young cartoonists (I roast myself here) are just as smart as they are by leaning into flashy panels and formalism, even when they don’t fit their assignments. It tries to show. But Adriano does everything that is useful to the story and elevates every aspect of my script. The first thing I heard from everyone when they first read the book was about Adriano’s colour, and of course they are gods. But after the first shock of a piece of stunning colour, you start diving into what he is doing with his character work and the quality of his lines, and you get the level of his craftsmanship that is on the skin It turns out to be more than the depth of – it’s the whole body.
Bird: How does your own experience as an artist and visual designer affect the way you write manga?
Boss: I’m guilty of putting stage direction on almost every page. But Adriano knows he ignores me whether he has better instincts or solutions. In later issues there were some small chase scenes and I didn’t write any panel descriptions for those pages at all. I gave Adriano something like a prose-style paragraph that tells him what will happen on those pages, and I left all the panel decisions to him. The results are great, and it’s not the way we think we should always be adopted, but it’s fun to get a grasp of the different ways our collaboration works.
Tori: True crime has rapidly risen to a prominent height of popularity. How did you want to approach true crime in this comic?
Boss: I am a passionate consumer of true crime media and I am for most of my life. So, although there is never a book intended to ripple your fingers about this genre, I still need to say some important things about it. I’m excited to see people’s reactions to what we’re doing at the end of the book. We don’t say we have a paper on this topic, but we definitely swing with it.
Adriano Turtulici Artwork
Bird: Gialo is a cinematic movement that is tied to a certain time and place. Was adapting to comics a difficult process?
Boss: In fact, I found this process to be really smooth. The genre itself produced as much as many comics have done, derived from newsstand’s cheap pulp novels. The Dim Store Murder Mystery features a leather-covered knife-wielding killer, with a neon-colored blood bucket and nude. Like the popular genres of previous eras, there are things that need to be pushed back when updating for a modern audience. But part of the reason we leaned against the Jarosub genre, needless to say, it felt like its lighting and pulpy themes fitted easily into the comics, not just the novel genre.
Byrd: The act of writing is at the heart of the series’ narrative, including the author’s greatest fear in the form of blank pages. What influenced the series’ meta approach?
Boss: I usually hate stories about artists and writers. I do both for a living and observing on a daily basis is a terrible and boring profession. That’s unless you see people sitting still for a minimum of 8 hours a day. But it became an obvious answer to what a story is and how we communicated it as the subject, when we came up with what we wanted to say in the book. The metatextur nature of it makes sense to explore.
Bird: You worked in a variety of genres and styles. Do you enjoy the challenge and experiment?
Boss: That’s true. It’s probably quite stupid to want to jump around genres like I do, but I can’t help with that. I love that storytelling is at its core what we do as humans, and every genre has a tool set to work with its own tools. Learning how to use them to make something in every sandbox is my favorite thing.
Bird: What other works do you recommend checking out to readers?
Boss: If readers prefer the mystery of doing bad things, I have another small town mystery story called Dead Dog’s Bite from Dark Horse Comics. But my other two books, four kids step into the bank, and the ongoing image comic series, what’s the farthest from here? Author/Friend/Devil and Matthew Rosenberg are also great books that people should check out. One is about child theft and the other is about child gangs. Let them know which is which.
Artwork by Tyler’s boss
Like this:
Like loading…
