Reflecting the Monster in Into the Unbeing

Cosmic horror is a genre that defines itself heavily on the unknown. Many of the most popular stories deal with beings from beyond the stars or the fabrics of reality that the human mind can comprehend. Into the Unbeing by Zac Thompson, Hayden Sherman, and Jim Campbell is exploring those themes from a more rooted approach. It’s taking the ideas of Cosmic horror as we know it and planting it deep within the dying Earth to make us question if humanity is the monster that cannot be fully comprehended.

In Into the Unbeing, a group of climate scientists called S.I.N.E.W. working in the Australian outback discover an impossible landform that resembles a human head and mouth. They venture inside expecting the unexpected, and the titular Unbeing delivers. Inside, they discover things that defy everything they know about the world they have spent their lives studying that leads to the questioning of everything they hold dear.

Zac Thompson’s work has always delved into different facets of horror that have been evolving with each new story. So many ideas and incredible scenes populate each of his indie comics. There is an almost guaranteed time of reflection after finishing one of the stories. Each is a story that makes you sit with the implications of its metaphors and themes as you try to wrap your mind around them. Personally, I have felt like each of the stories is an evolution of the themes explored in the one before. Thompson continues to grow and excel as a story teller in his own right. Into the Unbeing is another step in the evolutionary chain that is a Zac Thompson story. There are certain portions of this story that felt like tools left to rip into the flesh of the Unbeing presented. It’s an incredibly well crafted story that uses it’s pieces to push the reader to unpack everything on the page.

Our legacy is mass extinction. Any other meaning we find is, at best, an abstraction.

This quote has embedded itself in the grey matter of my brain since I first read Into the Unbeing. The text bubble with incredible lettering done by horror’s best letterer Jim Cambell has left a flash frame imprinted upon my retina. The only way I was going to be able to remove it was to figure out what it meant. But once I had sat with it in the larger context of the story, it feels like it is the connection to that cosmic horror label. It is the thesis of the story.

With a cosmic horror like The Thing, you see how these cosmic horrors are not a simple thing that can just be stopped by normal means. These ideas or things are a plague that will wipe out everything it can in the most timely manner. We cannot understand the oppositions reasoning for what it does which creates the true fear inside.

But what Into the Unbeing is placing on the table is that the horror is us. There is nothing an alien or cosmic god can do to humanity that humans haven’t done to themselves or could do worse. To plants, to entire species of animals, and in some cases even to other humans. Humanity is a force of extinction.

Colonization and extinctions are common place in humanity and in our story telling. Horror is a genre that allows us to face concepts that could be too broad to consume in any other genre. We see the themes of the destruction of the “other” by other groups who thought themselves the superior to the “savage”. Groups arriving with superior guns, germs, and steal to bring death and fear to a group of people unlike themselves is a staple in story telling when dealing with humans. Into the Unbeing presents the Unbeing as a monster but below the surface, it’s a reflection that humanity has been the Earth’s cosmic horror since we were able to walk on two legs.

The Earth hasn’t been able to fight back everything we have done to it. Deforestation, pollution, and many other things could be solved if humans didn’t refuse to change. We continue to kill the Earth despite the avalanches of evidence burying us under their sheer weight. With cosmic horror, we typically follow the group fighting back against the horror. But Into the Unbeing follows the monster, humans.

The world is immovable. Hesitate and it’ll break you.

The Unbeing looks like a human, with a gaping mouth and head protruding from the Earth itself that our characters must enter for their own safety. Humans have mistreated the Earth that cradled them since their inception but this is the pushback. Hayden Sherman’s masterful art style breaks down the Unbeing in many different ways to strengthen this reflection of the toll of humanity’s horror. While the characters go on this fantastical journey through a cosmic-esque landscape inside of the Unbeing, we see them struggling to understand this extremely foreign concept. One they seem to have plans to conquer in their own way. But the art creates page layouts that mimic an anatomical medical chart of different very familar human organs that these people are traveling through. They journey through veins and find themselves in different organs with wonder while we see what is happening. Hayden Sherman paints the humans as parasites in something much larger than themselves on a Earth they have already seemed to have sentenced to death.

Cosmic horror can rely a lot more on psychological fear rather than putting the burden of the horror fully on making everything a blood and gore fest. The story sets the pieces in place with prose pages in each issue to give deeper insight into humanity. In Into the Unbeing, a group of scientists investigating an anomaly is not always as it seems. From the jump, S.I.N.E.W. screams that it’s a group raging against the dying light with ulterior motives. A sinew is connective tissues like ligaments and tendons that keep your body moving so you know they had someone in their marketing working all hours trying to cram an acronym together to fit that naming convention. They want to be seen as the worlds saviors. Even after the destruction humanity has caused, they are still struggling to keep their grip around the throat of existence.

Into the Unbeing being promoted as a cosmic horror confused me after reading the first issue and it might for you as well. After reading the first three issues and sitting with the themes, it feels like the ecohorror that Thompson has become a master of has taken root in a cosmic manner. This is a story that will have you rereading every issue once a new one hits the shelves to fully grip what Sherman and Thompson are putting on the page. Even with the label of the cosmic on it, this is a story that is a deep look at what horrors we have wrought despite knowing what may come from it. The Unbeing is a manifestation of the Earth fighting back. If only the Earth around us could make us see the path ahead instead of allowing us down our path to becoming the cosmic horror any further.