The comic-writing duo discuss two of their latest horror series
While most of our spooky szn celebrations have involved watching horror films or becoming Michael Myers in Halloween: The Game, you can’t front on diving into a deliciously horrific tale, especially when it’s a comic book.
During New York Comic-Con 2026, Complex caught up with David Dastmalchian (M. Bison in the 2026 live-action Street Fighter) and Leah Kilpatrick (Murderbot), a comic-writing duo who attended NYCC’s 20th anniversary to discuss two of their current projects: <a href="https://www.darkhorse.com/comics/3016-081/kingdom-of-earth-1/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Kingdom of Earth for Dark Horse Comics and <a href="https://panickentertainment.com/the-accessories/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>The Accessories for Panick Entertainment. If you love horror, both take on the genre in unique ways.
In Kingdom of Earth, imagine a time when every monster you can think of roams the Earth…and humans are their fuel. You might be surprised by some of the monsters who show up, too! The Accessories, on the other hand, focuses on three classic horror sidekicks—Dracula’s Renfield, Dr. Frankenstein’s Igor, and Mrs. Hyde—and brings them together for an adventure. Both draw real-world parallels, with Kingdom of Earth taking a more political approach and The Accessories reading like a workplace revenge tale.
In conversation, Kilpatrick and Dastmalchian recount how their writing partnership began, their monstrous Google Drive of projects, the motivation behind both books, and more, including thoughts on Dastmalchian’s upcoming M. Bison comic book!
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the two of you start making comics together?
David Dastmalchian: Oh my gosh. We met in Chicago in 2008, 2009, and then Leah and I moved to L.A. around the same time, 2009, 2010. She produced a short horror film, science fiction, that was really cool that I acted in. And then we just became friends.
Over the years, I always admired her work, especially the stuff she did in the comedy space. I knew she was a big geek like me. I was starting to find some work in comics creation starting around 2017, 2018, ‘19. I got more and more busy with comics, and I was really exploring my love of horror in comics, and I wanted to imbue more comedy into that. Leah and I were hanging out, talking, working on, I don’t know, different ideas here and there. I was like, “Would you be interested at all in working on this comic that I’m doing?” I was doing a thing for Dark Horse’s Headless Horsemen at the time, and we had so much fun making it.
It went so well that I was like… I do a lot of my writing in partnership. I’ve written a lot of my best work with co-writers. So it’s a process that I love developing with talented people because they make me better.
Leah, talk about that. Is it a situation where David’s like, “Okay, I’ve got this idea for an Ozark howler. How can we make this work?” Talk about the back-and-forth between you two.
Leah Kilpatrick: We talk about monsters all the time. It’s just driving around L.A.; we’ll be in traffic for an hour, and it just goes there. Every different type of monster, and usually we’re talking politics. But with the idea, something like Kingdom of Earth, we talk about monsters so much that we’re like, “What if every monster ever was in a comic book?” And that includes local lores, fables, anything that any man, woman, kind, humankind has ever thought of. What if it was just all here? And so with Kingdom of Earth specifically, we just wanted basically a playground of monsters.
Dastmalchian: I mean, imagine every single… We just got two Magic: The Gathering cards. I love Magic. I love Super Smash. I love the idea of places where you could take different monsters or different characters from different IPs and throw them all in the ring together. So in Kingdom of Earth, it’s like all these monsters battling for control, and it gives us a great narrative device to explore ideas about powerful beings, trying to argue and fight over territory resources, political control, while all the people that keep the machines working are suffering down below and just basically being literally eaten by them, because I feel like that’s what goes on in our real world.
Kilpatrick: And essentially we just talk about it all the time, so we put it to paper. It’s just, we’ve always been… I think we’re just naturally… I don’t mean to [sound] self-contentious in any way, but we love stories, so we just feel like natural storytellers. And I think we think about things so much that in order to spell [it out], we have to spew it out of us. And, thankfully, we have the medium of a comic book to be able to do that with some of these stories. Very lucky.
I don’t want to dance around too much, but I mean, talking about playing in different worlds, I imagine, is that where The Accessories comes in? Because I love the idea of taking three different monster stories, and taking those sidekick characters, but talk about…do you ever run into any issues with IP or anything?
Dastmalchian: Kingdom would be tricky, because in our dream world, every monster ever imagined in the minds of mankind come[s] to life [and] are in that world. So everything from Greek mythology up to Freddie, Jason, Godzilla. So when you’re dealing with IP in that space, at some point it gets a little tricky, and we just try to be creative with the art and the artistry in the way that it’s executed because Sue will be like, “It can’t look like Pennywise, but it’s a killer clown.” But with Accessories, luckily all those characters are in the public domain, Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde. So there is a lot of free reign to be had. And with their sidekick characters, I mean, it was all Leah’s idea. The whole concept of the Accessories came from this demented little brain.
Kilpatrick: I think, whenever I see these movies, I put myself in them, and I’ve seen so many of… Universal Monsters is my favorite thing ever. So I’ve been invested in these stories forever, and I think I go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all get Dracula. We love Dracula. But who’s cleaning up all those dead bodies? What’s the reality?” I think I go in the logic of what would actually be the day-to-day and how annoying it would be to have to get rid of that many bodies. How many body parts and stitches and Igor and digging up bodies and graves is hard. And then they make fun of him for his hunchback. It’s rude.
It’s a lot.
Kilpatrick: I think a lot of us had to have certain types of jobs where we feel unheard, unseen, and it’s a big narrative of mine that I’ve been going to therapy a lot for is this needing to feel seen, and what does that actually mean? Because when you are, then you separate from the thing that you think is shadowing you. The spotlight might not necessarily be what you’re envisioning it. And so what’s great about our Accessories is they’re not innocent. They are killing people. They are burying people. They’re cutting them up. And when they are on their own, I think they’re afraid and have to find their own identity.
I think that might be the scariest thing because we are essentially our own core sponsors. There’s a lot of angles to it that really interest me. I just always though about Igor and Redfield and-
Dastmalchian: It’s weird how it all comes into being as we’re making the books, because obviously that whole idea is bigger, broader, deeper, on a much more cellular level than the two of us in our lives because we experience… We have our own privilege or whatever. There’s people suffering in the shadows in ways that are [inexplicable] to the conscience of the human mind. But interestingly, because Leah has experience, and I’ve seen it firsthand, how, as a creator or as a person even been put into the shadow or in the corner, even in putting the book out and releasing the book, I am at a point in my career, I’m older, I’ve been doing this longer, but I’ve also found some success in film and television space that is very unique and very special. And we try to capitalize upon that to maximize accessibility to audiences to learn about things like The Accessories. And Leah’s always had peace with that and been like, “I get it.” But at the same time, it’s very weird when they’ll completely leave her name off of an article or misspell her name [in print] or a poster or a piece of art around the work. It doesn’t even say her full name on it. It’s very interesting. And so… [Ed. Note: Dasmaltchian’s phone fell to the floor, randomly.] Then she knocks my phone out of my hand. [Both laugh] She gets so violently angry. [More laughter] No. She puts that into the story, and it informs the stuff in a really cool way.
It’s because you’ve got a medium for that, but I think it’s also key. I think that’s probably the beautiful thing about being able to do horror. I mean, when I realized that it’s always working on a different level, you know what I mean? When I read the first Kingdom, I’m like, “OK, I see what’s going on here,” but then it’s like a company meeting, and they’re trying to figure out the supply chain. It’s that type stuff. I guess my question is, how deep does this go?
Dastmalchian: There’s no limit to our imaginations on this stuff. I see Kingdom becoming an ultimately global story. Accessories could go… I mean, think about how many monsters there are, and not necessarily every monster having a henchman, but every monster has something or someone that lives in the shadow. What about the monsters themselves that have existed in the shadows? Is Creature from the Black Lagoon the monster or is Creature from the Black Lagoon an accessory to some scientist’s exploitation or some capitalist exploitation of their habitat? I don’t know. We haven’t even gone there yet.
Kilpatrick: I mean, with Kingdom, I think it’s such a grand idea that that’s why we narrowed it in to North America, specifically what we’re calling the Northern Territories. What’s great is we get to focus on those local lores, but then also say we were in what we’re calling the Eastern territory in Maine, we have Stephen King characters. You know what I mean?
Dastmalchian: In New York, what monsters are exclusive to just New York? You’re in Jersey. Is there a Jersey Devil? Is there this? Is there that?
Jason Voorhees.
Dastmalchian: Yes. Every time we travel, we go to new places, always looking at local cryptoids, local mythologies, local lores, and legends. People have their own traditions of monsters that exist in these different landscapes. You go internationally, there’s stuff that comes from religions, that comes from popularization, comic books, movies. Imagine all that shit getting to battle it out? Everybody thinks Godzilla automatically. I’m like, “no, man, there’s a lot of smart monsters up there making good plans.”
Do you guys have a database or a whiteboard or something with—
Dastmalchian: We have a Google Drive that is… We’re very deep into our Google Drives. We have so many projects right now, and each one is filled with folders, sub-folders, sub-folders. It’s a digital library. It’s like a digital Smithsonian.
Kilpatrick: We’ll find new things. David will come back from doing Street Fighter press or something. He’s like, “Oh, I met this person from this town that told me about this urban legend that they grew up with.” And then we put it in our drive. And then what’s so great is we get to… I mean, it’s kind of selfish because now we get to learn about all these cool things, and we get to learn why they scare people. And I love that part of it as well. It’s interesting to see what everyone’s scariest monster growing up was, where that came from.
Now I have to ask, but I want to keep it grounded more in comics, because I’m very interested in you playing M. Bison, but you’re writing an M. Bison comic book as well. I’m assuming a lot of your research into the character turns into the story. Was there anything in particular that you dug into?
Dastmalchian: Yeah. What makes the person this person? I think that about every character. It doesn’t matter what character I’m playing. It doesn’t matter if I’m working on Late Night with the Devil. It doesn’t matter if I’m working on a Dexter character. I’ve got to understand, figure out what makes this person operate the way that they do. What is the thing they’re wrestling with? One of the biggest questions for me that always gives me so much strength in performance is: what is the thing in the world that turns them nine years old inside? What is the thing that makes them the most scared? And for Bison, who’s been on this mission since he was a kid, with things that I’m going to explore in the comic book that happened to him in his early years that sent him on this mission of trying to understand and master martial arts, the art of war, the art of power, the evolution of the human physique, he has come across all of these mystical powers, and he has this whole movement built around him that is based upon the belief that he actually possesses the cycle power. In this movie that we made, he does not. He has everybody thinking he does, but it’s like the Wizard of Oz. It’s all smoke and mirrors. And then he knows that if he gets found out, his entire operation’s going to collapse.
So in the writing of the comic book, I was like, “what goes into making a person that terrified that they need that much power, that they’re willing to do whatever it takes?” I mean, it’s like you see it in the news, man. You see people in men’s positions of power right now, who you know, underneath their very fragile skin, are terrified little boys inside, and they can’t even have somebody question them, let alone criticize them, without wanting to start a nuclear war. So imagine, take that to the extreme of cycle power and you’ve got great terrifying horror stories. Indeed.
And speaking of a Street Fighter, Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, these dudes, man, they’re some of my favorite new friends. I love them.
