Hobtown Mystery Stories returns with another perfectly unsettling slice of small-town high weirdness
Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes’ Hobtown Mystery Stories has always lived in a strange interzone between Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew sleuth adventures, creepy deep-woods paranoia, and small-town bucolic cuteness. This November 25, Oni Press is releasing The Secret of the Saucer, the first brand-new Hobtown graphic novel since the series moved to Oni, and it’s as uncanny and delightful as fans could hope for.
If you’ve read the earlier books (The Case of the Missing Men and The Cursed Hermit) you already know Hobtown’s peculiarities. Weird rituals and secret societies. Masked figures in the shadows. Kids who seem to be participating in some strange bureaucratic dream logic. It’s a small Nova Scotia town that rides on a general strangeness which suggests it might be built on a magnetic anomaly or some ancient grudge.
The new volume also doubles down on something the series has always done so well: capturing the way small towns can feel simultaneously comforting and ordinary yet surreal and quietly menacing beneath their surface, where mundane lives and the truly bizarre sit next to each other on stainless diner stools. The Secret of the Saucer trains its lens on a contested mayoral race that seems to tweak the town’s already-fragile reality, a literal outbreak of backward thinking, a cryptid-like “Ape Lord,” and of course, the titular flying saucer that behaves more like a sentient anomaly than a vehicle from another world.
The Hobtown Junior Detective Club (Hobtown High’s overeager, occasionally in-over-their-head teen sleuths) is falling apart right when Hobtown needs them most. Pauline, Brennan, Dana, and Denny…everyone’s rattled, everyone’s trying to hold the pieces together as those pieces keep shape-shifting. Pauline and Brennan are still reeling from the events depicted in The Cursed Hermit, the rest of the club is immersed in a leadership squabble, and the saucer’s reality-warping side effects aren’t exactly helping any of them think straight.
Forbes’ art and Jason Fischer-Kouhi’s colors are gorgeous here: muted, grainy, almost overly intimate. Think Twin Peaks school yearbook photos mixed with the bureaucratic matter-of-factness of a government UFO dossier. Editor-in-Chief Sierra Hahn describes the series as “if A24 re-made Stranger Things,” which cuts pretty close, though Hobtown is weirder, cozier, and more handmade-feeling than any studio comparison can capture.
Oni has shared an exclusive excerpt with Boing Boing from the new volume. If you haven’t paid a visit to Hobtown yet, it’s a great (and eerie) place to start.
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