by MATTHEW WOODLEY

The grotesque, growling monsters that Stephen R. Bissette has produced over 24 years of horror comic creation stand in noteable contrast to the jolly voice on the other end of the phone.

“I have no idea why horror caught my fancy when it did, at a very tender age,” he laughs, “But it did, and I’ve never outgrown it.”

Funny, too, that the prolific cartoonist, writer and scholar, best known for Saga of the Swamp Thing and Tyrant (and the list goes on) has spent most of his life in laid-back Vermont—not exactly horror central (unless you count Champy, the legendary creature who may or may not live in Lake Champlain).

“A certain part of me does come from my growing up around the woods,” says Bissette. “I was one of those kids with a microscope, and I raised amphibians. I always had a strange fascination with the diversity of life out there, and particularly the forms that adults seem to find the most grotesque. Every imagined monster is composed of something in nature. I remember when the film Alien came out, I instantly recognized where they were coming from because I once had dragon larvae in an aquarium with some tadpoles I was raising. The whole extendable jaw, that’s where it comes from.”

Though his fascination may partly have hatched in the insect kingdom, Bissette has developed it into a comprehensive study of the genre. He retired from drawing comics in 1999—“a generational shift,” he calls it—but remains immersed in the comics world, primarily as a scholar. Since the early ’90s, he’s been giving a five-part multimedia lecture series on horror comics: where they came from, where they are and where they’re headed. This weekend, he brings the first two parts, “Roots” and “The Comic Book Terrors,” to the Fantasia festival. They cover extensive ground, from 12th-century Japanese Ghost Scrolls to the works of Hogarth and Goya, to Tales From the Crypt and William Gaines’s EC comics line and the ensuing backlash from psychologists and parents galore.

“Being a kid, I was fascinated with all things that most adult authority loathed,” he says (ever cheerfully). “I was always in a position of having to defend my tastes, and, as I grew up, it seemed to me that the horror movies and the horror literature I was attracted to were very confrontational in nature. I mean, by the time I was 12, I had read every Edgar Allan Poe story I could find, and it’s very confrontational literature—it really holds a mirror up to ourselves, saying, ‘You are mad.’… I know that what’s going on right now in our culture is very much feeding the genre of horror, and I think we need it—I think that it’s a way that we speak to ourselves as a culture about things we don’t want to talk about.”

Stephen R. Bissette’S Journeys Into Fear is at the De Seve Theatre: Part 1, July 16 at 2:45 p.m.; Part 2, July 17 at 3 p.m.