Stephanie Williams Talks Bringing the Smile Entity to the Gridiron In New Comic Series

Few things are as sweet as a smile. It’s a sentiment most of us believe or, at the very least, have heard time and time again through songs, poems, or films. American filmmaker Parker Finn had other plans for that idea when he unleashed Smile in 2022, turning the universal expression of warmth into something you’d never want to see creeping across another person’s face again. 

The film’s simple yet devastating premise, that trauma itself is a curse that can be passed from person to person with just a grin, struck a nerve within the horror community, and its 2024 sequel only widened the crack Finn had opened in audiences’ sense of safety when it comes to someone bearing their teeth. 

Since then, Finn has been happy to let other storytellers step into his nightmare and build their own additions onto it. The first to take on the challenge was Hannah Rose May, whose comic series Smile: For the Camera, dragged the entity into the cutthroat world of high fashion modeling.  

May’s series, illustrated by Miriana Puglia, was proof that the Smile mythology could travel well beyond movie theaters, and that other writers could find just about any dark corners of the world to plop the entity into. 

“Parker, with Smile, made it that we’re aware that it’s a debt chainmail essentially,” May tells Den of Geek. “That’s how I see Parker’s world in the sense of, ‘you see it, you pass it on.’ Other than that, he’s danced around the mythology but hasn’t gone in too deep, so it made it an open playground for the likes of me, which was very nice.” 

Now, the franchise is expanding again with Any Given Smile, a five-issue comic series from IDW Dark. It’s written by Stephanie Willaims, who made history this year as the first Black woman nominated for Best Writer at the Eisner Awards, and has numerous Marvel and DC titles under hit belt.

 Set 10 years before May’s run, Any Given Smile trades runways for arena football, with art by GLAAD Media Award-winning artist Pablo M. Collar and colors by Tríona Farrell. 

The comic takes place in January 1995 and the whole town of St. Augustine, Florida, has championship fever. The American Arena League title game is a week out and the Sharks backup quarterback, Maximilian Dupree, finds himself turned into a sudden superstar. There’s just one problem: Max is drowning in gambling debts. 

His solution? Throw the biggest game of his life to make it all go away. Unfortunately for Max, the debts he owes are the least of his worries as the Smile entity has found its way into the local betting underworld too. 

Leaving a trail of hallucinations and suicides in its wake, the entity works through everyone and anyone tied to Max. Meanwhile, a sports journalist starts digging into the deaths piling up around the championship, while Max spirals closer to kickoff and even closer to losing his grip on reality. 

“Hannah and team did an amazing job laying a foundation for how to translate that world to comics and make it work. I thought of it as different Halloween houses, essentially,” Williams tells us. “Each issue is a different section of that haunted house. Basically the same thing for Any Given Smile, kind of treating it the same way and setting things up differently so that you’re getting a different scare.” 

That different scare comes down to pacing, trading the entity’s quick hop from model to model in May’s comic run for a slow burn that lets tension build toward the championship game. This approach also gave Williams room to flesh out a cast of characters who feel lived in long before the entity ever comes for them.

Rather than centering the horror entirely on Max, Williams wanted the people orbiting his story to carry their own weight too, each one caught up in the same web of gambling and desperation slowly closing in on the town. Throughout the comic, she features characters who feel like “…people just trying to get by in life, and the various battles that they have to face in order to do that.” 

“We have a cocktail waitress working at the casino, who is trying to help her son get the medication he needs. We also have a radio personality who, on the surface should not need to do anything shady on the side, but he gets sucked into that because that is just his vice,” Williams says, speaking on a couple of the secondary characters introduced in issue #1, which Den of Geek got an early look at ahead of its September 23 release date. 

Williams’ character philosophy echoes something May has said about her own approach to the Smile franchise: that horror only lands if the trauma underneath it feels real. 

“Smile is trauma. The entity is trauma,” May says. “For [people] to die, you have to see what’s traumatic to them, what their past trauma is on the surface. It allows for very fully fledged, interesting characters that have meat on the bones, essentially.” 

That dedication to horror has now landed May a new comic series, Fatal Fest, and a film adaptation of her masterwork comic The Exorcism at 1600 Penn, currently in development with Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. 

That same belief, trauma as the real engine of the horror, is what makes Williams’ next tackle at the franchise feel less like a stretch and more like the obvious next step. Dropping the Smile entity straight into the world of professional sports is a pairing that, on paper, sounds a bit odd but in practice Willaims argues it might be one of horror’s most natural playgrounds. 

“What could be more scarier than going from being the guy on the bench to being thrust into playing the biggest game of your career?” Williams asks. “That’s a dream come true, but we’re just turning it into a nightmare.”

Williams points to the pressure that comes with that kind of spotlight, the years of training funneled into a single moment, and the unsettling question of what comes after. “All of these things, I would believe, would lead to somebody having an existential crisis. Or it could be scary in that way.”

For Williams, the hope is that readers will walk away seeing athletes a little differently. “I want the takeaway to be as much as you are enjoying the teams going out Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and sometimes Friday now, that you’re remembering that these are real people who have a job, of course, they’re doing what they love, but at the end of the day, they’re still putting themselves on the line,” she says. “Kind of like modern day gladiators.”

Williams also isn’t shy about admitting the job of writing horror comes with its own strange risks, mainly when it comes to dreaming up new ways for the entity to torment its victims. “I was trying to come up with the deaths…so my internet search tab, I hope no one ever needs to see that,” she laughs. “It’s really bad. But also, I guess at the same time, fun, so it’s got me looking at myself a little bit differently.” 

That fascination with guts and gore goes back further than this series for Williams, though. “I’ve always been a fan of horror,” she says, “but definitely more so in my adulthood. I love a creature feature, and I remember the very first time I saw the entity, the Smile entity, appear at the end of the first movie. I fell in love essentially with this horrific thing.”

It’s a sentiment May shares with us too, tracing her own love of the genre back to her small Irish hometown surrounded by nothing but cornfields. “Horror shaped me. That was the God honest truth. I’ve always loved the medium. I’ve always wanted to partake in it to some degree.”

That shared love of the genre is exactly what makes the entity itself such a gift to write. To Williams, it even belongs on the same pedestal as some of horror’s most iconic creations. “I just think the Smile entity is one that is going to stand out for a very long time for me in the same way that Michael, Jason, and xenomorphs do,” she says. 

Wrapping up the conversation with some thoughts about the first issue preview, Williams discussed something she got to do that May couldn’t in her own Smile run. Without giving away exactly how or when, Williams was granted permission to bring the entity into frame earlier than fans might expect, a decision she said was meant to upend whatever assumptions readers would walk into Any Given Smile with following May’s series. 

“I was thinking about it like a roller coaster ride. What was it? The Velociraptor at Universal Studios! I love a roller coaster and there’s a point in the ride where it’s like ‘Oh, ok, we’re almost done,’ then they shoot you off again at 70 mph. So, that was kind of the approach for this,” Williams teases. “I wanted readers to feel as though, ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ No you’re not!” 

Issue #1 of Any Given Smile kicks off on September 23, 2026.

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