Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees – Halloween Special

#1C

Peach Momoko Variant

Release:	Oct 07, 2026
Cover:	Oct 2026

Creators

Writer	James Tynion IV | Jared Cullum
Artist	Jared Cullum | Dave Wachter
Cover Artist	Peach Momoko
Colorist	Patrick Horvath
Letterer	Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

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“Spooky Season” doesn’t really mean much to me. For the most part, I like autumn more than the other seasons, I suppose, but while I do occasionally indulge in some horror – particularly in comics – it’s not really the genre I favor.

Still, it is that time of year, so I thought I should take a look at something seasonally appropriate, and looking at my recent purchases it was either this or the DC Halloween special, and in the case of the latter, the only things about it that are scary is how expensive it is and how mediocre all the stories in it are.

If you’re not familiar with Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees, it features a world very much like ours that is populated not by humans but by anthropomorphic animals. There are regular animals just like the ones in our world, and the anthropomorphic animals recognize their kinship with them but remain distinct, and so you’ll get bizarre scenes of things like an intelligent pig walking past a butcher shop that’s prominently featuring pork chops, hams, and pork sausage for sale.

But while it’s okay to slaughter those pigs, it would be a crime to do the same to the latte-drinking pig on the street.

Which brings us to our protagonist, Samantha Strong, a bear who is a vicious predator but also a small business owner and pillar of the community of Woodbrook. This bear shits in a toilet, not in the woods.

She uses the woods for something else entirely.

Samantha is a serial killer, one who leaves her small town on occasion to hunt in the big city, selecting victims at random, bringing them out the woods, killing them, bleeding them, chopping them up, and burying their various parts inside of paint cans.

In the most recent book, Sam was outed as a killer, but managed to escape justice, causing considerable mayhem in the sleepy little town she called home in the process.

This story from James Tynion IV and Jared Cullum picks up some time later and does not directly feature Sam, instead providing us a look at the legends that have formed in her absence as a group of kids gather around a campfire on Halloween to tell stories about the serial killer who is still out there somewhere.

Most of the stories are untrue, of course, with untruths buried inside of untruth, but they reveal an essential truth about the way the memory of Samantha Strong still haunts their town.

Only one of the stories is true, though it doesn’t directly feature Sam, focusing instead on an encounter the kid had with a victim, albeit not one of Sam’s but rather of a wannabe who had hoped, in vain, to become Sam’s protege and partner. (A fatal error.)

That same kid has a story of an actual encounter with Sam that we see but that she does not tell because she fears what that story might reveal about her.

The special closes out with a preview of the next book in the series, giving us a look at where Sam is ten years after the events that saw her fleeing Woodbrook (and nearly burning it to the ground in the process).

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is an interesting take on serial killer stories, not just because of the kind of world in which it takes place, but taking place in that world does make it interesting. (It was also the subject of discussion at a meeting of Comic Book Club a while back.)

If I were to describe it in the most basic terms I’d call it “Dexter meets Serial Mom in The Busy World of Richard Scarry.”

While the characters in it are not at all Disneyfied, one thing it does is bring into stark relief just how weird the world of Disney – or any world featuring animals who dress and act like us – really are if you stop and think about it.

Not just weird: spooky.

And ’tis the season.

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