Canadian filmmaker produces a comic

The Wellington Advertiser wrote about a filmmaker, David Antoniuk, who's now produced a comic book of his own:

Award-winning film director David Antoniuk has always considered himself a writer, and the Guelph/Eramosa resident has now published his first comic book.

“If I could do anything I would sit around campfires telling stories,” Antoniuk told the Advertiser. “In my bones, it’s who I am.”

Shortly after moving to Toronto from Winnipeg to go to film school in 1989, Antoniuk wrote a short story that was published in Ice magazine.

Antoniuk was a young man grappling with age-old questions: “Why are we here? And what happens to us when we die?”

The story explores the question with both comedic and serious tones.

“I never want to preach to people,” Antoniuk said. “I want them to have an enjoyable experience” that gently leads to self reflection.

[...] Nearly four decades later, that story – Time Spent – has taken on a new life in the form of a comic book.

I certainly hope he means it when he says he doesn't want to "preach" to anybody, or lecture them, because there's been too much of that in the past quarter century or more, and it's hurt the entertainment scene very badly. But there's some dismaying news in this item as well:

People can expect to see more from Antoniuk in the near future. He’s working on turning short horror stories by his wife, author Vanessa Ireson, into comic book form and is also co-writing a young adult graphic novel about a group of kids fighting monsters.

After that, he’s set to write another comic book he said will have more in common with Time Spent.

I've said before that the overabundance of horror stories has had a ruinous effect on entertainment, and this is doing nothing to prove contributors to any entertainment medium are trying to move away from that. Even the premise of fighting monsters is enough to wonder if the guy's that obsessed with horror themes. So while I wish I could appreciate a filmmaker trying comics for a change, the part about writing horror stories only dampens the impact.