Off Panel: A Comics Interview Podcast · SKTCHD

Giallo-wood with Alejandro Arbona

May 12, 2025·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Lake Yellowwood Slaughter shifts from a teen slasher to a giallo horror by targeting wealthy parents instead of campers.

The conversation opens in launch mode. Harper introduces Arbona as the writer of Lake Yellowwood Slaughter and as an editor connected to Lazarus Fallen, The Forged, and Black Magic. The setup has a funny little wrinkle: Lake Yellowwood Slaughter is not a movie, but the campaign is borrowing the feel of a nearby theater premiere at the Nighthawk before the Kickstarter begins. That choice gives Arbona room to explain why this comic feels different from earlier work. He says it is the first one where he built the whole thing from the ground up, and he sounds more charged than polished, which helps. The clip soon moves from campaign talk into story surgery. Arbona remembers a Marvel superhero pitch from early in his editorial career that had a situation, a solution, and a tidy win. Too tidy, in his view. His fix is very comics-room: the hero tries the first answer, fails, makes everything worse, and only then finds the better way through. That turns the anecdote into a clean craft lesson without making it feel like a lecture. A two-act version can get from trouble to rescue, but the stronger version tests the character in the messy middle. Harper gives the digression space, which is where Off Panel tends to work best. The exchange is warm, practical, and a little nerdy in the right way. By the end, Lake Yellowwood Slaughter feels less like a campaign plug and more like a window into how Arbona thinks about comics: collaboration, pressure, revision, and escalation at the right moment.

As heard by us

A candid comics conversation about building a story from the ground up.

Alejandro Arbona discusses Lake Yellowwood Slaughter with the steadiness of someone who has spent time on both sides of the page. The episode is strongest when it settles into practical comics craft: how a story takes shape, where it can come apart, and what an editor notices…

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Why you'd press play

You want a comics conversation about how a story gets built, fixed, and made to land.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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