Nosey elderly neighbors, yapping lap dogs, truck traffic, and vocal opposition to change — these are some of the terrors of Collier County, according to Rich Tommaso, author and illustrator of the black and white comic series, “The Horror of Collier County.”

With Halloween just around the corner, the title of this five-book series caught my eye while surfing Google for a story idea. Five days and $18 later, the books arrived, missing Comic 4 of the series.

Published by Dark Horse Comics, “The Horror of Collier County” is not for young audiences due to strong language and occasional mature graphics.

Written between 1999 and 2000, the story is a horror satire on life in Collier, which evokes paralyzing paranoia from the main character, Fran, a single-mother from New York, visiting her mother, a Naples resident in Pelican Bay.

After an alligator encounter, a near death miss by a speeding truck, zombie undead neighbors that spy from behind every window and bush, to a run-in with a vicious pink poodle, the punk rock New Yorker ends up inexplicably paralyzed in a Naples hospital. She is later flown to Miami due to the lack of CAT scan technology in Naples. There, she immediately comes out of her paralysis upon learning that she is no longer in Naples.

Of course, most of the action (during which the ‘zombie’ neighbors storm the house and Fran fends them off with a weed whacker), takes place in the missing Comic 4, which is unavailable at Big Katts, a comic vendor in Naples. The store does not carry the series or the graphic novel later created from all five comics in 2001.

Collier County Public Library does not have the comic series or the graphic novel in its system, but is able to special order the publication upon request.

Efforts to reach Tommaso to ask what inspired his comic series were unsuccessful. Representatives of Dark Horse Comics said they do not give out contact information on their authors.

An online biography, states that Tommaso has been writing and drawing comics and graphic novels for more than 10 years. He was born and raised in what he calls “one of the dullest parts of the New Jersey suburban-lands” and watched too many depressing films by people like Fassbender, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and the like.

Some of Tommaso’s other works include “Clover Honey,” “8½ Ghosts,” and the very controversial, “Perverso!” He has been published by Fantagraphics Books, Top Shelf, Dark Horse Comics, Chronicle Books and Alternative Comics.

As to any resemblance to our own Collier County, a disclaimer in the back of Tommaso’s comic reads, “Names, characters, places and incidents featured in this publication are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, institutions or locals, without satiric intent, is coincidental.”

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