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Mothman writer to sign books at local comic shop

A panel from Chad Lambert's graphic novel, "Return to Point Pleasant," shows Mothman in full flight.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 1:42 PM Friday, June 12, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — John Denver once sang lovingly of its country roads, as if to imply that on a backwoods thoroughfare, there’s not a care in the world.

But in 1966, there was a chance something would’ve swooped out of the sky to chase your car or, worst-case scenario, mutilate your dog — proving that the only thing scarier in West Virginia than strip-mining is the Mothman.

The winged, red-eyed creature supposedly terrorized one West Virginia county for a year back in the ’60s, all but ensuring itself a starting spot on the cryptozoology dream team of Sasquatch, Nessie and, later, El Chupacabra.

The southern Ohio town of Jackson was just close enough to Point Pleasant, W.Va. — Mothman territory — for Chad Lambert to hear all the stories.

“When I was a kid,” he explained, “the old bogeyman-around-the-fire stories were always about Mothman.”

Drawing from those stories, the 38-year-old Cincinnati comic book writer set out to explore the Mothman mythos.

His graphic novel, “Return to Point Pleasant,” collects two standalone issues of his “Point Pleasant” comic book dating back to 2004 and adds 30 pages of new material.

Lambert will sign copies of the graphic novel on Saturday, June 13, at Main Street Comics and Games — the first in-store guest for the fledgling local comic shop.

“It’d never really been done in comics,” he said. “There’d never really been a comic book that explored the phenomenon of Point Pleasant, W.Va., in a legitimate way.”

The book spans close to 200 years of Mothman lore, from the Revolutionary War to the 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge that sent 46 people to their death in the Ohio River — all witnessed by time-traveling paranormal investigators from the future.

“I wanted to make sure that the events they were witnessing were dead-on,” Lambert said. “The bridge did collapse. People did see this thing. Whether it was real, they did see something.”

Mothman, by the way, is seen by many as a harbinger of doom for the bridge collapse. (A point made by the 2002 Richard Gere movie “The Mothman Prophecies.”)

“These were very salt-of-the-earth people,” Lambert said. “For them to come public with stories of missing dogs and seeing lights in the sky ... these people weren’t out for attention.”

As a subject, Mothman is a doozy.

Was he the result of a Shawnee curse? After defeat at the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, Chief Cornstalk supposedly put a curse on the area.

Or was Mothman the by-product of — surprise, surprise — the U.S. government?

Now a wildlife area and EPA Superfund project, the 8,320-acre West Virginia Ordnance Works site near Point Pleasant was used to make TNT during World War II.

“There’s an awful lot of secrecy down there as to what the TNT area was,” Lambert said, “and what the government was doing.”

Lambert — who’s also the current writer of “BloodRayne: Prime Cuts,” based on the video game series — took a chance and sent a copy of “Point Pleasant” to Ray Bradbury.

“It’s based on his writing style,” Lambert said. “It has that kind of retro-noir feel to it.”

Bradbury scribbled back some high praise — with a minor problem.

“He misspelled frightening,” Lambert said.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.