Preview: ‘Over My Dead Body’ – Sweeney Boo’s Witchy, Magical YA Graphic Novel – Coming In September

Brand-new witchy fun in a young adult graphic novel, Over My Dead Body, from Sweeney Boo and Titan Comics/Harper Collins in September.

Sweeney Boo, a Canadian comic artist and illustrator, had been working in French comics as letterer and colourist before making her US debut in 2016 with a cover and short tale for Image Comics’ Rat Queens. She’s since worked on costume designs for the Marvel Rising show, and has worked at BOOM! Studios, Archie Comics, IDW, Marvel, and Image Comics. She is the current artist on IDW’s collaboration with Marvel, Marvel Action: Captain Marvel, written by Sam Maggs, and her debut graphic novel, Eat, & Love Yourself from BOOM! Studios was released in April 2020 – and you can see a preview of that great-looking work here.

Now she’s back with her second graphic novel, Over My Dead Body, this time through Titan Comics in the UK and Harper Collins in the USA.

It’s got that whole Sabrina vibe to it, described by Titan as “perfect for fans of the Dark Academia genre,” which is, it seems, a whole thing that got a name in the last few years even though the idea of dark school dramas have been around for as long as fiction’s been around it would seem and have certainly formed a staple of so many Brit girls’ comics of the ’60s and ’70s.

Over My Dead Body explores Younwity’s Institute of Magic and the forbidden forest that lies beyond in the company of young Abby, who has lost the closest thing she ever had to a sister, Noreen, who’s just gone, just before Samhain, where the veil between the world of the dead and the living is at its thinnest. Which means the Institute is rather busy and all of Abby’s classmates are quick to put Noreen’s disappearance aside. The Coven will find her, Abby’s friends say. They have it under control.

But Abby, as you could have obviously guessed, just can’t let it go. In the vein of classic girls’ school mysteries of old as well as these new ‘Dark Academia’ genre pieces, she goes investigating, complete with that other staple of these wonderful stories, the curious group of friends, and comes to realise that Noreen’s disappearance has a lot in common with another girl who went missing all those years ago.

Yep, this sounds right up my street, full of the ideas and motifs of everything that came from those wonderful (and at times donwright weird) comics that filled the shelves in the 60s and 70s (the likes of Misty and Spellbound in particular, but these gothic tales were also all over the likes of Jinty and Tammy and the like) but updated for a modern audience where the old ideas of ‘girls’ comics and ‘boys’ comics are (thankfully) long, long gone.

Over My Dead Body – by Sweeney Boo. Published by Titan Comics (UK) and Harper Collins (USA) in September 2022

Now, preview time…