It's GrymStone's World! We're Just Living in It, Baby!

Greetings, Substackers!

This is Scott Alan Gregory, writer of GrymStone. I have kindly been invited by the wonderful folks at Summit Comics to introduce myself and tell you all a little about how GrymStone came to be and what you can expect from me and the character going forward.

On November 24, 2025, Summit Comics announced their first ever Writer Talent Search.

Superstar artist Pete Collins designed two original villain characters to be offered up as blank slates for prospective writers to name, come up with backstories for, and script 2-page shorts about. Winners would have their stories illustrated and published in Summit: Pinnacle #1 and be invited to join the Summit team of creators.

I submitted entries for both characters, but the one that truly spoke to me was the muscular, bald, angry-looking fellah with dirt and grime crusted over his arms and legs.

Turns out, he reminded me of something personal.

Around 10 years ago, I took a cross-country trip back to my boyhood town of Lake in the Hills, IL, about 50 miles outside of Chicago.

Aside from my old house being replaced by a gas station, not much had changed since I left in 1987. It was a veritable time capsule: the streets, the houses, the smells…everything presented the same, and I came down with a pretty severe case of The Feels. It was a mild October Saturday, and before I knew it, I had spent hours walking in the footsteps of my younger self. I revisited the lake I used to slide across in the winter, hills where I went sledding, houses I’d trick-or-treated at. I climbed the ladder in the run-down old silo, went into the creepy woods behind my old elementary school, and placed hands on the giant oak at the edge of the school playground.

Most things looked smaller now because I had grown, but not the old oak; it had kept growing with me, and it was enormous. I’d always been drawn to that tree. I used to make a sport of burying my action figures at its base and then coming back months later to try and dig them up. Weird kid. There was a bench there now, in front of the tree. I’d end my pilgrimage here, before heading back to my car and onward to my uncle’s house in the city. My legs were tired, so I sat. On the bench beside me were piles of fresh dirt and several bits of metal scrap. Someone must have come through the area recently with a metal detector and dug down, only to discard on the bench whatever findings turned out to be worthless.

Except it was not all worthless. There was, in fact, treasure there on that bench among the mangled washers and soiled pennies, treasure that had been rotting in the ground ever since I’d buried and forgotten about it over 30 years before: one of my action figures! It was a 1980 Star Wars Hoth Rebel Soldier, which I had gotten as a mystery prize after collecting and sending in a bundle of Kenner Toys “proof of purchase” bar codes.

Pretty disappointing prize, all told. Why not Luke, right? Who was this nameless guy? (“You can PRETEND it’s Luke,” says Mom. Whatever, Mom!) No wonder I’d forgotten him there. But now...we were reunited.

I cried a little. Cuz, wow, right? What were the odds? What were the odds that my buried figure would be dug up and left on that bench for me to find, after traveling hundreds of miles to be right there, right then, after decades away, on this random October Saturday? I mean, wow. You’d cry, too. That’s crazy.

Anyway, he was a mess. Almost unrecognizable. His time buried in the earth had not been kind to him. Much of the plastic had rotted through and become encrusted with grime. None of his joints moved; he was literally fused with the dirt. Limbs had been all but replaced with grime. He was something else now. Monstrous.

And that’s what Pete’s design recalled to me. I thought, what if this character was an action figure? One that, like mine, had been buried in the Earth for decades, and had fused with the dirt and roots and grime? And what if, in that time, something else had seeped in and fused with it as well? Something wicked and dark and vengeful that had been trapped in the Earth for centuries?

And that is how the idea for GrymStone was born. I dashed off a few paragraphs of backstory, scripted a little two-page tale, and sent it off to the good people at Summit just a hair before the contest deadline. A few weeks later, my world was shook; GrymStone was named a winner, and I was warmly welcomed as a member of the Summit team.

In the months since, GrymStone has become a 24-hour-a-day obsession. I fleshed out his world—now a rich and fully-realized corner of the Summit universe—and the bones grew for a 5-issue series called GrymStone: Soil & Ash, which will explore GrymStone’s past and present by looking in on the stories of three troubled families across three different eras.

If you’re weird, welcome home. The foundation of my comic book sensibilities was poured in the ‘90s when the weirdest and wildest alternative comics from VERTIGO, Epic, and Dark Horse were thriving. With GrymStone, I gleefully tap that same tragicomic vein, exploring and expanding those early influences to create a surreal slow burn that combines folk horror, human drama, and violence. I teamed up with the insanely talented illustrator Thiago Motta, with whom I have been collaborating since early 2020, and we have been building Soil & Ash together from the ground up every day. I cannot wait for you to see where this adventure has taken us. Issue 1 launches on Kickstarter on September 8^th, and I beg that you check it out. Sign up to be notified HERE: https://readsumm.it/grymstone

And in the meantime, if you have not already, I strongly suggest that you upgrade to become a paid subscriber here on Substack to catch a couple of exclusive standalone GrymStone shorts that are not available anywhere else.

Ten years ago, on a mild October Saturday, fate reunited me with an action figure I had buried and forgotten about for 30 years. I don’t know how all the various threads of contingency synchronized to make that happen—and I never will—but this year, I think I finally know why. Long live GrymStone! Long live Summit Comics!

Thanks for reading!

Best regards,

Scott