It’s tragic how inured the public has become to stories of the abuse—both mental and physical—that happens in churches and place of worship that crawl across the bottom screens of cable news. Spaces that are supposed to be safe and holy have become—in some cases—areas to fear.
But that religious abuse doesn’t just come within church walls. We see in America legislation that restrict bodily autonomy and freedom of expression in the name of “family morals” and “old time values.” We see our kith and kin wish harm to those whose beliefs and who they choose to love veer from the so-called norm. Many have come to fear those who preach hate in the name of love or turn a blind eye to prejudice, reasoning that divine justice comes for the allegedly wicked.
That’s why BOOM! Studios newest comic series Be Not Afraid feels so timely and unsettling. Written by Jude Ellison S. Doyle, illustrated by Lisandro Estherren, colored by Francesco Segala, and lettered by Simon Bowland, Be Not Afraid follows Cora, who was visited by an angel as a young girl. The unwanted assault that followed resulted was a half-angel/half-human hybrid child named Enoch, with a nature that’s monstrous and whose presence has terrorized Cora’s small town, as well as Cora herself. On the cusp of Enoch’s 18th birthday, her pleas for help with her son from Heaven have been answered… but not exactly how she expects. Bleeding with American Gothic tones, cries of rage of the discarded and the disenfranchised, and shining a light on the evil lurking in places that should be respite for the weary, Be Not Afraid is a comic that will captivate you and refuse to let you look away.
I spoke with Jude Ellison S. Doyle recently about the idea behind Be Not Afraid, how their upbringing impacted both the religious and setting of the comic, working with the creative team, and comic book writing gives them an outlet that other forms of writing don’t.
I walked away from reading issue #1 of Be Not Afraid unnerved, which doesn’t happen often to me when reading horror comics. While the terror that Cora feels concerning her son is palpable, what was at least equally disturbing was the isolation and indifference—regardless of whether or not it was born out of fear of Enoch—that she feels from her small town. She’s hurting, afraid, and desperate, and while her god is silent for a good part of the inaugural installment, the quiet she feels from the people who live life with her is haunting. My experiences in growing up in the South and with organized religion made this book hit home in a jarring way, but you don’t have to had those encounters to feel the type of dread and loneliness that Cora feels for her son and those around her. You’ll want to keep reading to see if Cora’s prayers are answered and, if so, what those prayers will cost her. I’ll certainly be there in the front pew.
FreakSugar: For folks considering picking up the book, what is the conceit of Be Not Afraid?
Jude Ellison S. Doyle: Be Not Afraid is a book about Cora Rehms, a young woman who was visited by angels as a teenage girl, and her son, Jordy, who is a Nephilim – a half-human, half-angel abomination. Nephilim are cosmic horrors. They fill the whole world with “blood and unrighteousness.” Having Jordy in the world is like having an unshielded Chernobyl walking around; he distorts and destroys and kills everything he comes in touch with. So, God sends one more angel – Mr. Phim – to Cora, and commands her to kill her own son.
FS: Cora Rehms is already seen as a layered character with conflicting feelings and motivations on display. How would you describe Cora?
JESD: Cora, in many ways, stands in for those of us who have been hurt by organized religion, or by organized Christian churches in particular. Cora started out as someone loved God very deeply, and who was very true to Christian faith, really deeply. She’s been given visions of God and angels, which supposedly only happens to the holiest of people. Yet she’s also been overlooked and dismissed and preyed on – people don’t believe in her visions because she’s too young, or a young woman, and the angels she counted on to protect her have violated her and hijacked her bodily autonomy. She’s given birth to a son, who is half-angel, and who has turned her life and everyone else’s into a version of Hell.
Growing up Catholic, I got really familiar with the idea that you can have faith in God and also be hurt in terrible ways by religious leaders. The hurt and the faith have to co-exist with each other, and it’s really hard. So, I wanted to start there, with Cora, because she’s absolutely not to blame for believing. Her love, her faith, and her search for meaning are very pure. But they’ve been exploited and used to harm her, and she now lives at the mercy of forces far greater than herself, who may not even care what happens to her. I think a lot of people who pick up the book will share some version of that story.
FS: American Gothic tales are never afraid to shy away from religion. I’m a religion major and a nerd for American Gothic, so this first issue was right up my alley. What drew you to writing this type of story?
JESD: I’m from the American South, originally – from Tupelo, Mississippi – though I haven’t lived there since I was about three years old, and I was also raised in a deeply Catholic household (though, for what it’s worth, my mom was drawn to the Catholic legacy of social justice, and is really cool with me being a feminist queer trans whatever). So, the Southern Gothic, as a genre, always felt instinctively right to me. It wasn’t just about the region, it was that the religious terror I grew up with – the terror of Job, and Revelations, and martyred girls who pulled their own eyes out rather than marry a Roman pagan – was so much more present in, say, the stories of Flannery O’Connor than it was anywhere else in the culture.
It’s hard to overstate how gory and full of body horror many Catholic stories are. My current favorite is Saint Agatha, who was tortured, burned, and ripped apart by iron hooks. Her breasts were ripped off with pincers. However, being a saint, she could miraculously heal herself. She’s now the patron saint of breast cancer patients, and her traditional iconography shows her offering the viewer her own cut-off breasts on a plate. The Italians also have a traditional cookie in her honor, Minne d’Sant-Agata, and I’m just going to link to them, so that you can see what they look like: https://www.lacucinaitaliana.com/italian-food/italian-dishes/minne-sant-agata-authentic-sicilian-recipe?refresh_ce=
I was reading some of these stories when I was five or six years old, and they’re baked into who I am and how I think. Jordy, the Nephilim at the center of the story, just showed up for me as a character – he was a little boy who looked normal, but if anyone touched him, something terrible would happen. I started writing that down, and the whole world of Be Not Afraid came into being around him almost immediately. It was just an expression of things I’d been carrying inside for a long time.
FS: I’m from southeast Kentucky and the atmosphere of the book feels very familiar to experiences I’ve had in certain parts of my hometown. Did you have to do any research for this book?
JESD: Finding models for Enoch, the town where Be Not Afraid takes place, was a little odd. I used to spend my summers in Lynn, Indiana, with my aunt and cousins – Lynn is an extremely tiny town, and it’s most famous now as the hometown of Jim Jones, the Christian pastor who started a cult and committed the Jonestown massacre. I think probably Jim’s ghost still haunts Lynn, and cast his shadow over this story, because I was unaware of that when I started writing Be Not Afraid, but I found out while sending Lisandro photos of Lynn as reference for the artwork. It makes alarmingly perfect sense, given how the book plays out.
That said, Lynn wasn’t the only model. I was also sending Andrew Wyeth paintings of Pennsylvania and Dorothea Lange photos of Kansas dust bowl farmers in California. The landscape of upstate New York, which is very pastoral and full of rolling hills, inspired a lot of it, as did certain parts of Kansas. I wanted to do Americana without citing a specific American landscape, for reasons that will become clear later in the story. It was a hard thing to pull off, and Lisandro is maybe one of the best Americana artists in comics, so I doubt it would have worked without him.
FS: I can’t say enough good things about the story, the art, the coloring, the lettering. Every piece works in harmony in a way that you don’t always see this well done. What is your collaboration like with the creative team?
JESD: I can’t take total credit for this – BOOM! is so incredibly careful about cultivating their relationships with colorists and artists and letterers, and they always put together a package that feels like fine art. Like: I can’t say enough good things about Lisandro’s art, but Simon Bowland, the letterer, is the unacknowledged VIP of this book, because he has to bring us into several different versions of Heaven or Hell via font choices, and he does it. So, honestly, it’s all been really painless, because everyone involved is so talented and so clearly giving their all to this project. All I have to do is rise to their level.
FS: Do you have any favorite American Gothic stories of your own?
JESD: Obviously, Night of the Hunter is one of the greatest movies ever made, and everybody is going to name it first – but it was a huge influence here, too. Wise Blood, both the Flannery O’Connor book and the movie with young Brad Dourif, played a big part. I don’t think Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian is often listed as an American Gothic work – it’s more horror-Western – but he has a level of genuine religious dread and apocalyptic terror in his writing, particularly in his characterization of the Judge, that was a major inspiration. Also, weirdly, a lot of my favorite American Gothic stories aren’t stories, and they aren’t by Americans – the music of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave is really drenched in those tropes, even though Harvey’s from England and Cave is from Australia. That, and Johnny Cash, defined the mood I was working for here.
FS: You are a prolific writer. What does comic writing give you that other types of writing don’t?
JESD: I have tried writing prose fiction, and maybe I will again, but it’s not a natural fit for me, somehow. Prose, to me, is for making an argument, or presenting ideas, like you do in an essay or a reported piece. When I want to tell a story, I think in visual terms. Comics let me work from that side of my brain. They let me create something first and foremost with the goal of making it beautiful. I think Maw and The Neighbors and Be Not Afraid are all visually very lovely – rather than starting with an idea or a point in mind, I started with something I wanted to see and built out from there. I obviously didn’t create all that visual beauty; I can only draw stick figures. But that’s the other part of why I love comics; I get to be a collaborator. Instead of being front and center, I’m part of a larger picture, and I have the privilege of watching the artists and colorists and letterers build on, and often improve, my original vision.
FS: What are you reading right now?
JESD: In comics, I’m really enjoying Elizabeth Sandifer’s Last War in Albion, which is this massive web-based work of criticism analyzing the careers of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. That’s caused me to go back and read or re-read their catalogues – I’ve read a lot of Moore, because everyone has, but I’d actually never read The Invisibles or Morrison’s Doom Patrol run, and I’m enjoying them both tremendously. I also just read Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle, about queer teen girl werewolves. It’s so much fun, and it’s been on my list forever. I actually didn’t realize that Sterle – who did the Modern Witch Tarot that is massively popular with all my queer lady friends – was the artist, so the vibes are impeccable.
FS: Is there anything you can tease about what we will see later in the series?
JESD: We’ll find out more about Cora, and the precise kind of existential threat Jordy poses to Enoch. We’re also going to spend more time with the townspeople and figure out how they’re responding to living with a cosmic, reality-bending horror. That might be one of my favorite developments in the book.
FS: If you had one final pitch for the book, what would it be?
JESD: This was the book where I finally felt like I really knew how to write a comic, and that empowered me to write the hardest horror comic I could. With Maw, my first, I didn’t know if I’d get another chance, so I threw everything I had into it. With Neighbors, I was still learning, so I was cautious. This time I trusted myself, and that let me write the darkest, deepest, most viscerally disturbing story I could. I wanted to drag the reader under the surface, into Hell, and not let them back out again for six issues. So, if that sounds like fun, pick up the book!
Be Not Afraid #1 is on sale now from BOOM! Studios. Issue #2 goes on sale Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
From the official description of issue #1:
NEW SERIES. Cora Reims lived the isolated life of a simple farm girl until one fateful summer day, prophetic visions brought her a visitor made of pure light… an angel. In the aftermath, Cora gave birth to a child, a Nephilim: the offspring of an angel and a human woman, seemingly imbued with evil itself. 17 years later, that child’s cherubic appearance can no longer hide his monstrous nature. Frogs boil in their skins as he passes. Crops rot. The townspeople live in fear, knowing that atrocities follow closely behind him. Now, on the eve of his 18th birthday, Cora receives a new vision… Heaven itself has called upon her to destroy the abomination born of her own flesh and blood. Be Not Afraid is a breathtaking new series from visionary writer Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Maw, Hello Darkness) and acclaimed artist Lisandro Estherren (Nightmare Country, Redneck). Equal parts feminist rage and folk horror, this descent into Hell itself is fueled by the mythological underpinnings of American Evangelical tradition, presenting brutal cosmic horror through the lens of Southern Gothic; a truly otherworldly journey that can not be missed.
And from the official description of issue #2:
Is Cora a victim of God’s wrath or the cause? Cora’s childhood in Enoch wasn’t easy. A fraught relationship with her mother and a challenging journey to her faith in God has left her jaded in adulthood. Cora’s last encounter with a visitor led to her downfall and unleashed Jordy’s evil on the world—how can she trust that Mr. Phim won’t lead her into more danger?