Horror Comics

guess it makes sense to repost 'em here

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0791.jpg

My pride & joy on this planet is my complete hardcover Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, and Vault of Horror collection. I could not love these more. Strong-chinned villains, femme fatales, and all of them get chopped up by giggling psychos or eaten by zombies.

Ditto.

omg @ that cover!!

say uncle if these are too hueg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0795.jpg

and yeah totally agree about all the EC horror titles. they have an eternal charm.

xp

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0797.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0809.jpg

dig the visual puzzle aspect of this one

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0807.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0801.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0802.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0804.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0812.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/IMG_0814.jpg

It's absolutely worth tracking down the issue of BLAB! (#10, I believe) containing his "The Trumpets They Play!", which is one of my all-time favorite comics pieces.

Yes. This is one of the most distressing comics I've ever read. Also, the story in Jim #2 where Jim meets the flayed man who 'likes it' gave me a full-on panic attack in 1990.

my problem w/ horror comics is due to their anthologized nature, it's hard to figure out where a particular story was published... there are a bunch I remember from childhood and would like to read again, but I can't remember what mags they were in. these have puzzled me for years:

* a jealous understudy for hamlet decapitates the lead actor, then boils his head and uses it as a yorick prop when he assumes the role

* a man bumps his head at a subway station and suddenly has the ability to see the monsters who have been masquerading as humans, then he gets on the wrong subway car (always thought this was an influence on jacob's laddder, similar feel)

xpost

Not the story you mention, but equally horrifying in a similar way:

http://e621.net/data/40/6b/406b0fe0085eaadebac75d12dd1d494c.jpg

* a jealous understudy for hamlet decapitates the lead actor, then boils his head and uses it as a yorick prop when he assumes the role

Pretty sure this is EC, otherwise I wouldn't recognize it.

it sure reads like an EC plotline

Yeah, that was an actual episode of Tales From The Crypt (starring Jon Lovitz!).

ACTING!

that tales from the crypt eps was different - lovitz kills off a guy playing hamlet but it turns out the guy was going to be a real-life yorick prop and lovitz suffers his fate instead

google leads me to similar stuff like this, which is close but no cigar

http://marvel.wikia.com/Mystery_Tales_Vol_1_8#Appearing_in_.22The_Madman.21.22

why I remember it clearly was the grisly panels - there's actually one of the guy dropping the decapitated head into a pot of boiling water to convert it to a skull, but I'm not about to google "boil decapitated head"

somewhat related... Drew Friedman's visit to the MAD offices as a teenager: http://drewfriedman.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-visit-to-mad-magazine.html

A few years ago I bought a 4 dvd set of horror comics .cbr's on Ebay in order to get a hold of my favorites: Gold Key's "Ripley's Believe It Or Not". Genuinely creepy ghost story comics that never fail to give me the willies.

oh yeah! my favorite was the one w/ springheel jack

http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/300w/302/193021/6836761_1.jpg

* a man bumps his head at a subway station and suddenly has the ability to see the monsters who have been masquerading as humans, then he gets on the wrong subway car (always thought this was an influence on jacob's laddder, similar feel)

I managed to figure this one out - a miracle, considering it was originally published as "dungeon of doom" in chamber of chills #6 in 1952, then redrawn and retitled "the monsters" in tales of voodoo in '74, and then republished in horror tales in '76 and weird in '79. I remember the redrawn version from the '76 horror tales, the '52 version is available online tho:

http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2007/08/dungeon-of-doom.html

love how jaunty skeleton-conductor is in the next to last panel there

That's a good blog -- I finally found one of my horror favorites there. Guy who loves the sadism of boiling lobsters alive gets herded into a volcanic vent by a bunch of vengeance-minded crustaceans.

http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2008/04/red-as-lobster-jim-mooney-rip.html

I think what creeped me out about "dungeon of doom"/"the monsters" was the lack of moral or irony, the two victims are innocents who get sadistically dispatched, plus the implied doomsday scenario at the conclusion

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/dungeon_of_doom.jpg

Ha that lobster one has been on my mind since 1986.

POOR PAUL... YOU'RE BEING BOILED ALIVE!

If I could draw, I'd do a variation where the sadist loves roasting beets and a bunch of tubers lock him out of his house in the hot sun. "Poor Paul...you're red as a beet!"

I'll stand corrected on the computer color separation issue and won't argue that Pacific Comics often fell on the garish side of things in their recoloring jobs. I also don't particularly mind it. It looks like a very specific period in comics to me, which I remember fondly.

And if you want crazy colors, check out the Baxter paper reprint books that Marvel did around the time of MARVEL PREMIERE. Some wacky stuff going on there.

Oh, and horror-wise: STRANGE EMBRACE. Any good? I have a copy I got cheap years ago and lost in my labyrinthine 'to read' assemblage. Should I dig it out?

The British girls comic "Misty" owns this thread, though the fact that its contents remain unreprinted means I can think of them as being wayyyyyy scarier than they actually were. Not sure what I would now make of the one where a girl is rendered catatonic after (implicit) gang-rape by garden gnomes.

Preacher is not horror. Sandman is goth but not horror. Alan Moore Swamp Thing is goth but not horror. Hellblazer is not horror.

Apart from Misty, all those EC-style titles win.

Misty is fantastic. I have bought a couple of annuals and (aside from spotting Brit luminaries like John Ridgeway) they are flat-out brilliant. Actually, all girls comics are worth re-evaluation.

Alan Moore Swamp Thing is goth but not horror

lol waht

"not horror". right

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRI3pfLwuCppilNvmop4UL6fIns6KBohQgIFDoa0XwLg4ruUJfKKE0t2G5Duw

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OpcKuKK7bVM/TQTp-0syktI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/efL94TBiJWg/s1600/swamp29_08.jpg

Moore's Swamp Thing started out as horror, but that was only roughly the first third of his run.

Matt, STRANGE EMBRACE is amazing, rescue it from the stack

Will do, once I get research reading under control.

It's funny, but I've heard people put forth that Moore's on SWAMP THING wasn't horror. They're completely wrong. It turned into outsider SF, sure, but before that? Yeah, cringing horror.

yeah I think the horror stuff (zombies, possession, monsters, ghosts, serial killers, werewolves, vampires, demons, satanic cultists, etc.) is very much front-and-center until the "battle in heaven" and Swampy goin off into outer space.

this showed up in my FB feed today

http://www.raggedclaws.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/l-b-cole_uncanny-tales-n23_aug1954.jpg

THAT is a cover. Thought it was Kurtzman, but what I could dig up credits Russ Heath on the cover. Beyootiful.

Manga has barely had a mention here so I'll recommend The Drifting Classroom.

I think it's LB cole?

xp

russ heath sounds right - it's too well-drawn to be LB Cole, and it's not Kurtzman's style at all (and besides, he was working exclusively for EC at the time, never drew 'serious' covers for any comics publisher, didn't partic approve of horror comics anyway, even EC's, and only ever produced humour material for Atlas eg 'Hey Look')

heath went on to work with kurtzman on 'little annie fanny', and actually lived in the playboy mansion for a while!

btw, here's a link to a repro of ditko's most famous warren strip, 'collector's edition' - just look at the rendering!

http://johnnybacardi.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/heres-that-steve-ditko-story-i.html

It's possible that the Vicar is being satirically rockist. I take the point that Sandman stands out a little, but it's an open discussion whether this is because it's added to lists like this to sex them up a bit, or because there is an indie resisitance to adding the popular to the good.

Misty certainly appears to be the real thing, though.

I suspect I am the only person in the world that loves this, but Mark Millar's run on Swamp Thing, with art by Phil Hester and Kim DeMulder, is really great horror.

You're not wrong, it's a good run.

Getting back to Carl's first question, I have this and it's a pretty good compendium of a lot of type of stuff that's being discussed. Ranges from 1940s to 21st century. You could probably find things you like in it and then explore futher.

http://www.amazon.com/Mammoth-Book-Best-Horror-Comics/dp/0786720727/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344537217&sr=8-1&keywords=best+horror+comics

and that power records blog reminds me of the greatest thing to ever happen to 6 year old me

a story of DRACULA the WOLFMAN and FRANKENSTEIN

I checked this out from the library on a regular basis. I can still repeat lines of dialogue.

xpost yeah MM, SPIRIT WORLD is fairly early into jack's 70s DC stint (so still inked by vince coletta, unfortunately.) there was also the companion title, IN THE DAYS OF THE MOB, and a complete SOUL LOVE magazine prepared but never printed, and which sadly isn't in this new h/c - i'm guessing that jack's attempt at an african-american/blaxploitation romance anthology wld prob need a fair amount of contextualising, these days:

http://images.ha.com/lf?set=path%5B4%2F2%2F4%2F8%2F4248385%5D%2Csizedata%5B450x2000%5D&call=url%5Bfile%3Aproduct.chain%5D

i seem to remember being p disappointed by that Mammoth Horror collection, when i browsed through it - v poor black and white repro of out of copyright material and duff newer stuff. it's a shame, cos the Mammoth Book of Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett, is really excellent. In the UK at least these titles have been widely remaindered, btw.

one last post - wish i knew a lot more abt non-english language horror comics. in the uk in the early 70s there was a short-lived full colour magazine called DRACULA that reprinted some p choice, v psych horror strips by ppl like estaban moroto and this guy, enrik sio, who was doing some wild stuff with colour:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aF-Ofat7rvw/Tuh9wmKt64I/AAAAAAAAEgQ/QOmwm5PGPhg/s1600/Enric-Sio-6_baja.jpg

sorry, that shld be enric sio, tho i have seen it spelt both ways

It's possible that the Vicar is being satirically rockist.

I know you not.

With Swamp Thing, there are some gruesome scenes in the early Alan Moore run, but it does not have the air of ongoing dread one gets from real horror. Or maybe it does, I have not read the issues I have in a while. The one where Swamp Thing visits hell is a bit horrory, but I think you need more from horror than just seeing something horrible happen to someone - I think something manifestly uncanny needs to threaten or deliver actual harm to a point of view character.

I think "you are a vegetable that thinks it's a human" is pretty manifestly uncanny.

Demons, imps and demon possession all over the place until "Rite of Spring," then vampires, werewolves and zombies in American Gothic, then more demons and Evil Hand shakes hands with Good Hand. Pretty horror-y.

No to mention Jason Blod being all 'David Warner in The Omen' with the insurance salesman when he first appears.

the whole arcane storyline is 100% horror

Most of what I would recommend has already been mentioned. The Richard Corben Creepy reprint is lovely- it was overseen by Jose Villarrubia, IIRC, and while I'm not really qualified to judge the reproduction looks great to me. It and the Wrightson reprint are super-cheap on Amazon, too, or at least they were the last time I looked. And while they're not straight horror per se, Corben's Hellboy stories (especially the Appalachian witch story "The Crooked Man") are fucking amazing.

For horror manga, Junji Ito absolutely- start with the short "The Enigma of Amigara Fault," which is included in the second volume of Gyo, and move on to Uzumaki (and the hilarious/brilliant Higuchinsky movie if you're so inclined) and Gyo itself from there. Gyo is half out of print in English, but if you're interested I can hook you up with a scan- just email me through ILX.

Hideshi Hino is another one of horror manga's big names and well worth your time, though he's a casualty of Dark Horse's manga reprints falling out of print in the US.

I can also recommend a recent-ish series called Fuan no Tane- it's an anthology series of very short pieces, often fragmentary or totally unresolved, and at its best it can be amazingly effective:

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j289/ThreshholdLurker/02_018-1.jpg
http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j289/ThreshholdLurker/02_106-1.jpg
http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j289/ThreshholdLurker/01_029.jpg

Oh yeah, forgot to mention: Fuan no Tane isn't licensed in the US and only available through fan-made translations. Again, if anyone's interested, just let me know and I'll send over a zip/CBR file.

Only posting it here because it was mentioned a number of times itt: complete collection of Misty being released in September.

Has anyone attempted a comprehensive bibliography of horror anthology comics? And/or pulp and magazine stories? And if anyone has made the attempt, can you let me know in which asylum they're currently residing?

Any good horror comics blogs out there? Preferably ones that link to/post free whole stories (old or new). I managed to read loads of Junji Ito online, and followed DC Pages of Fear for the short amount of time it ran, but I seem to be out of luck when searching for more stuff to sink my teeth into.

If you can figure out DC++, there's a comics room there where I went on a deep dive and found scans of pretty much every comics anthology title that I was aware of and many that I wasn't. That's part of my problem: I have thousands of these things without any quick & easy way of knowing what material they contain short of opening them up and 'flipping' through.

I spent hours scouring through DC anthologies to find a particular Lee Marrs story that had burned itself into my brain as a kid.

Old Lunch- There's a book called Ghastly Terror with a complete index of pre-code American horror comics (Four Color Fear might have that too, can't remember). There's also The Great Monster Magazines: A Critical Study Of The Black And White Publications Of The 1950s, 1960s And 1970s.
I've never heard of a complete horror anthology listing though.

Emily- This blog is regularly updated and features mostly 50s comics but occasionally newer stuff. http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/

Nice, thanks Robert!

Ooh, cool, that looks great, RAG.

The deluxe complete edition of Junji Ito's Tomie is coming out in the UK on the 3rd of January:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1421590565/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3ENYW8WV04AUU&coliid=I2SVPU7GD92Y4A

This new collection also looks vmic:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Junji-Itos-Dissolving-Classroom-Ito/dp/1942993854/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=Q2XJZCTK43R838TS2JNC