Chinbeard Books has posted an Indiegogo page for The Collins Family Album, an unofficial celebration of the cult favourite TV show Dark Shadows, the crowdfunding campaign for the book launching later this month.
Written by Rich Handley, illustrated by Aleah Shockley, The Collins Family Album is an unofficial 60th Anniversary Dark Shadows celebration that also features essays by Penny Dreadful, Ansel H. Faraj, Stuart Manning and Craig Hurd-McKenney.
You can follow the page for now, and it will go live at the end of the month, coinciding with the Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary Event.
The Collins Family Album offers an exploration of the entire Collins family history, as presented in every episode, film, novel, comic, and audio. Written by Rich Handley and illustrated by Aleah Shockley, it’s designed by Robert Hammond and published by Chinbeard Books, a small publisher with big ideas who should need no introduction to regular downthetubes readers. This award-winning company mainly focuses on heritage properties, or new books or graphic novels that are a little quirky and might not find a home elsewhere.
Chinbeard, an imprint of Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd., has held the literary licenses for Robin of Sherwood, The Goodies, and The Tomorrow People, with more on the near horizon.
The Book…
Every family has its demons. This one has vampires, too.
In 1966, Dan Curtis and Art Wallace introduced something more than just a typical soap opera. Alongside the serialized storylines, cliffhanger endings, breathless romances, and mustache-twirling villains one would naturally expect from a soap, Dark Shadows added ghosts, vampires, witches, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, revenants, poltergeists, mythical entities, artificial humans, immortals, time travel, parallel universes, and more. It was a veritable monster fest of horror, science fiction, and classic literature, presented on daytime television and wrapped up in a Gothic Jane Eyre-inspired landscape.
The Collins clan rivaled their Addams and Munster contemporaries for sheer creepiness, kookiness, mysterious spookiness, and all-together ookyness – and 1966’s Dark Shadows was just the tip of the Gothic iceberg. The franchise has been rebooted multiple times, first as a pair of 1970s theatrical films, and then as a 1988 stage play, a short-lived 1991 television reboot, a 2004 TV pilot, and director Tim Burton’s 2012 film reimagining.
Each iteration has expanded the Collins lineage. And the many novels, comics, and audios, from numerous publishers, have added a plethora of new family members to the mix. The bloodline includes murderers, pirates, slavers, warlocks, witches, and sundry undead. No matter the century, generation, reality, or medium, the cursed and broken Collinses have endured and unleashed boundless horrors… and more than their share of day-drinking melodrama.
Although cancelled decades ago, Dark Shadows remains an immortal force that enslaves viewers in its thrall. The illustrious “Collinses of Collinsport” are at the heart of every iteration, and The Collins Family Album chronicles more than 400 members of the family. Many you’ll be familiar with, but others you might not be. So step into a monstrous and macabre family reunion like no other. Take a journey that will bring you to a strange and dark place, to the edge of the sea, high atop Widows’ Hill… to a house called Collinwood.
The Team
Rich Handley has authored, edited, or contributed to many books and essays for DC Comics, IDW, Topps, BOOM, Dark Horse, Titan, Lucasfilm, Paramount/CBS, and more. He has 25 years’ experience as a magazine editor and now works in academia.
His anthology Musings on Monsters: Observations on the World of Classic Horror, co-edited with Lou Tambone, was nominated for a Rondo Award for Book of the Year. His prose anthology Planet of the Apes: Tales from the Forbidden Zone, co-edited with Jim Beard, received multiple Scribe Award nods.
He also co-edited the Eisner-winning Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Strips collections with Dean Mullaney for IDW’s Library of American Comics; and edited Eaglemoss’s Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection; cowrote Magnetic Press’s Planet of the Apes Role-Playing Game; and has penned licensed Star Trek, Star Wars, and Planet of the Apes fiction. He has written about many other franchises as well, and he worked with DC on Rick Veitch’s acclaimed Swamp Thing 1989.
Aleah Shockley (self described “designer, illustrator, gothic enthusiast and part-time time traveller”) not only illustrated The Collins Family Album but also provided invaluable proofreading and fact-checking, collaborating closely with Rich on all aspects of the project. She drew ten full-page family portraits for the book by hand, each depicting a different iteration of the Collins clan from a unique branch of parallel time.
Aleah is a graduate of Columbia University, where she studied drama and theatre arts with a concentration in design, received the Austin E. Quigley prize, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She has been a costume designer with One Flea Spare, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Tempest, and Beyond the Rain; assistant costume designer with Stupid F***ing Bird; hair and make-up designer with Bona Varda; and dramaturg with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
An amateur fencer and swing dancer, Aleah is also a hobbyist Louis Edmonds historian and a mid-20th-century aesthete.
“Absolutely delighted to share my involvement with this meticulously-researched, comprehensive compendium of every Collins of the last 60 years,” she says. “My friend Rich Handley has overturned every (tomb)stone documenting the many lives and sometimes twice as many deaths of Collinses across page, stage, and screen, and I’m honoured to have contributed the illustrations for the various versions of a family that are figuratively and very often literally haunted by own portraits.”
Also on the Invitation…
The book’s foreword is supplied by horror host Danielle “Penny Dreadful” Gelehrter, of Terror at Collinwood fame, a podcast that explores and celebrates Dark Shadows. As a New England TV horror hostess, she hosted Penny Dreadful’s Shilling Shockers from 2006 to 2016.
Danielle is a three-time Rondo Hatton Award winner for Favorite Horror Host (2007 and 2010) and for Best Podcast (Terror at Collinwood, 2025). She was inducted into the Horror Host Hall of Fame in 2014, and into the Rondo Awards Monster Kid Hall of Fame in 2023. Danielle worked on Dark Horse’s He-Man and Masters of the Universe books from 2015 to 2021.
Along with Eric Marshall, Danielle co-wrote official character toy packaging biographies for Mattel and Super7. She has penned articles for Scary Monsters Magazine and pieces for books such as Vampira and Her Daughters, Monster Kidding, Wicked Witches, Our Shadowed Past Volumes I and II, and Daytime Gothic. When she’s not talking about Dark Shadows on Terror at Collinwood or hosting monster movies as Penny Dreadful, Danielle works as an adjunct English professor.
The afterword is supplied by researcher, teacher, and writer Craig Hurd-McKenney, Ph.D., who currently writes a popular line of Dark Shadows graphic novels. A recipient of the Xeric Grant and an Ignatz nomination for his comic book writing, he authored Curse of Dark Shadows, re-released in a revised edition last year, and its upcoming sequels for Hermes Press. His other books include Gold Key’s Boris Karloff Gold Key Mysteries #1, The Brontes: Infernal Angria, Some Strange Disturbances, and Station Grand.
The Essayists
The Collins Family Album will feature a pair of essays penned by prominent creators in the Dark Shadows arena.
Ansel Faraj, an award-winning independent filmmaker, has been making movies since he was six years old, and he counts himself lucky to have directed several Dark Shadows cast members. His most recent film, The Great Nick D, a showbiz comedy on the pitfalls of acting while never giving up on one’s dreams, was nominated for Best Picture at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival.
Ansel’s Todd Tarantula is a Los Angeles sci-fi mystery streaming on TubiTV and Blu-ray. His folk horror thriller Look Lake streams on Amazon Prime and TubiTV and is available on Blu-ray and DVD. He is the writer-director of Doctor Mabuse (2013), the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired The Last Case of August T. Harrison (2015), and the love story Will & Liz (2018).
Writer, designer, publisher, and occasional filmmaker Stuart Manning is the author of several Big Finish Dark Shadows audios, as well as early issues of Dynamite’s Dark Shadows comic books, and he currently edits the fanzine Daytime Gothic.
• Chinbeard Books are online at chinbeardbooks.com
- About the Author
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Books, Crowd Funding Projects, downthetubes News, Other Worlds, Television
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