Super Creepshow #1 reimagines classic superhero tropes, featuring ‘creepified’ versions of Spider-Man and the power of super-speed. In this interview, we chat with writer Ryan North about how he made super-speed the most horrific superpower of all.
Creepshow is one of the most popular and beloved horror anthologies of all-time. It all began back in the ’80s with the original movie, directed by genre legend George A. Romero (of zombie movie fame) and written by Stephen King. The movie spawned a sequel, and of course, later on was revived in Greg Nicotero’s TV series on Shudder. The series would make its natural progression into the comics medium through Image Comics/Skybound in 2019, garnering a dedicated audience of its own.
Creepshow spinoff series Super Creepshow is exactly what the title suggests — it takes superhero elements and tropes and truly ‘creepifies‘ them. Super Creepshow #1 features stories from fan-favorite comic writers Kieron Gillen (Young Avengers, Darth Vader) and Ryan North (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Fantastic Four). We’ve interviewed both, but in this article, we’re focusing on Ryan North’s brilliantly disturbing take on super-speed.
“It’s really a power of isolation: you can do things others can’t, and nobody else can see you do them,” North says of his choice to tackle super-speed. “When you use your powers, you’re isolated from the world – they stop moving, become statues, and you alone can see that. It felt like it would be a really creepy experience – when viewed through the right lens.”
With super-speed, there was plenty of opportunity to explore different avenues. For North, the was about exploring the ease averting responsibility. “We’re all familiar with great power begetting great responsibility, but with superspeed you have great power – and no way for anyone to enforce responsibility on you,” he said. “If you want to be, you can be forever beyond anyone punishing you, anyone doing anything to you – a true detachment from the rest of humanity. Felt like that could easily be corrosive!”
Ryan North is no stranger to penning comics depicting super-speed — in fact, he’s currently writing a Flash arc at DC. Of all the superpowers to choose from, speed remains one of the trickiest to write:
“Speed is always tricky! You want to show how it feels but it’s impossible to actually feel it. I was chatting with Mark Waid around the time of this project and he said the greatest writing discovery he had was while reading a Krypto the Superdog comic, where he goes missing and Superboy is trying to find him. There’s this beat where Superboy explains why he feels so connected to his dog, and he says ‘They were the little things – they may not seem important to you… things like the feeling of the wind in your face – in a way no one else in the world can feel it – or the sound bullets make when they bounce off living flesh.’ Hog wild, right? Only Superboy and his dog know that, and it connects them. Those words – that idea – cemented for Mark the idea you write these characters from the inside out, from the world as they experience it. So that’s what I tried to do here: write it from the point of view of someone who can now do these things nobody else can, and sees a way to fix some things with the world he disagrees with. (It does not go well.)”
Penning both Flash comics and a Super Creepshow tale on super-speed is quite the coincidence. For North, it was a unique to tackle the trope in very different directions. “It was fun to be able to approach the idea from these two completely different directions!” he said. “The speed in my story here is built for horror, while in the DCUniverse it’s built for adventure – and Wally West wouldn’t make the same choices as the protagonist of this story did. You gotta hope that the people who get powers are the good ones – and stable enough to handle it!”
For this story, he worked with long-time collaborator Derek Charm, an artist who isn’t particularly known for his horror work. “Derek’s great – we’ve worked together on Squirrel Girl in the past and get along like a house on fire. His style is normally not associated with horror, which is why I wanted to do it here: it feels like something insidious is invading his world, in a really creepy way.”
Ans while Derek Charm’s work isn’t synonymous with horror, Ryan North has tacked the genre before — with great success. One of his most renowned projects is Darkhold: Iron Man #1, which also blends superhero and horror storytelling. “I was really proud of that one,” he said. “I think part of the reason it worked so well was that I wrote it twice: initially as a longer story, and then as the shorter version that we published. It sucked at the time, but when you’re writing a story twice, you have twice the chances to think about all the choices you’re making and I think it worked out well. (I used a lot of what I learned there in this story too!)”
Clearly the superhero-horror subgenre works a treat. With Super Creepshow, it’s a big opportunity to take things further than ever before. “I think what makes them work is that it’s a direction you don’t normally see. We all fantasize about what we’d do with powers, and we’re not usually as selfless as our heroes, so there’s something cautionary in seeing how it can go wrong, I think,” North explains. “Stories are (among other things) a way to live new lives and make wild decisions without having to deal with the consequences in real life, and there’s no more wild decisions getting made than in horror. You add superpowers to that and you only escalate the types of choices that can be made. Sounds great, right? We thought so, so we made this comic!”
Super Creepshow #1 releases on March 18, 2026. Pick up your copy here.
