Classic EBI #34: Comics That Go Bump in the Night
Comics that go bump in the night
Everything But Imaginary -- October 29, 2003
Ah, it’s Halloween again, and there’s so much to do -- buy candy, carve the jack-o-lantern, iron out the wrinkles in that French Maid costume you wear year after year (I still can’t believe your wife lets you get away with that) -- but as comic readers, we have an added benefit that those poor, deluded creatures who haven’t discovered this artform yet don’t get to experience. We get to take home some great scary comic books.
Horror comics, of course, have been around for decades, most notably with William Gaines’ EC Comics. Those classics, like Tales From the Crypt and Haunt of Fear, are the granddaddies of any horror comics you see on the stands today the same way every superhero title owes a debt to Superman.
EC Comics were effectively destroyed by the creation of the Comic Code, though, and while sci-fi and monster comics managed to cling to life for a while, horror went by the wayside, totally restricted by their inability to show blood, slayings, or even such relatively mundane topics as vampires and werewolves. (Yeah. The code was that strict.)
Oddly enough, I am not really a fan of horror that relies on blood and guts. I don’t find slasher flicks or gorefests particularly scary (although I occasionally find a way to appreciate them as camp). If I want to get scared by a movie, I want something subtle. Something where the implication of terror is omnipresent, but you aren’t confronted with it face-to-face until the very end, if at all. Stuff like the first Alien movie and Signs are perfect examples of this.
The same techniques just can’t work in comic books. Sure, you can avoid showing the monster, but that’s not enough. You can’t create the mood of sitting in a darkened theater or the feeling of creepy music curling up your spine, and while it’s true that a good artist can have an impact on the pacing of the book through things as simple as the size and shape of a panel, there’s simply no way to control the speed of a comic book the way the director of a movie can to build suspense.
Comic books have to find a different brand of horror, something more cerebral. Implying the existence of a monster isn’t quite enough. Implying the existence of a milieu, however, is.
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman has often been touted as a modern horror comic. I have to disagree with that. I think it’s a masterful fantasy, but I’ve never considered it to be particularly frightening, with the exception of the truly chilling Serial Killer Convention storyline. Efforts at Marvel Comics like Blade, Tomb of Dracula or Werewolf By Night often turn into glorified superhero titles. I’ve heard good things about Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, but I must confess, I’ve never read it. I know, though, that if I didn’t mention it I’d get a half-dozen posts asking how I could possibly write a column on horror comics without mentioning Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Thereby, you may all consider it officially mentioned.
But now let’s take a moment to look at some creepy comics I have read, and some pretty good ones at that. I was really relieved to learn that one of my favorite CrossGen titles, Route 666, survived what can only be termed “The CrossGen Implosion” a few weeks ago. This is a great little horror book about a girl on the run from demons disguised as the sort of monsters you’d see coming out of a 50s-era B-movie: werewolves and vampires and zombies and the like.
Clearly, this in and of itself isn’t really very scary in this day and age.
Writer Tony Bedard takes things one step further, though, by making the demons agents of some mysterious dark force that employs black ghosts, the spirits of particularly cruel or evil humans, to harvest purer souls at the moment of death. Our heroine, Cassie, has been somehow gifted with the ability to see the ghosts, as well as see through the human disguises the demons wear. She’s also recent discovered new powers she has over her adversaries.
Bedard has tapped into one of the primary fears of the human condition -- what happens to us after we die? It’s not like he’s the first person ever to deal with this idea, or even the first person in comic books to write about it, but combining it with a flavor of monsters that we are conditioned not to find particularly frightening anymore brings a new air of menace to them and creates a really unique reading experience. It’ll be hard to watch old Lon Cheney movies again without feeling just a bit of a shudder.
Also dealing with the classic “life after death scenario” is the upcoming Dead@17, written and drawn by Josh Howard, a product of Viper Comics. (The good folks at Viper were kind enough to send me a black-and-white preview of Dead@17 #1 for the purposes of this column. They are receiving, as a token of my appreciation, this lovely parenthetical acknowledgement.)
Howard’s a newcomer -- new to me at least -- but I rather liked this story of two teenage girls, Nara and Hazy, a pair of best friends with problems that seem typical enough for teenagers, but turn out to be rather unique when you delve below the surface. Nara, for instance, has problems with boyfriends -- what teenage girl doesn’t? But the reasons for her problems, as we learn in the course of the story, are not common at all.
Hazy has family problems -- sad, but not unique. Those problems are exacerbated, though, when Nara is brutally murdered by a man with a blade. (This isn’t a spoiler, folks, this is all setup, the sort of stuff you get in a trailer for a movie.) Hazy, trying to cope with her friend’s death, starts to learn things about Nara even she didn’t know before, and what begins as her search for answers turns into a battle for survival.
Howard employs a very iconic (some would say “cartoony”) style that is quite unexpected of a horror comic book -- in fact, when I first looked at the characters, all I could think was that they would have looked perfectly natural showing up in an episode of the late, lamented Clerks animated series. Amazingly, though, this style really works. My only caveat is that the action scenes in the book are quite clearly manga-inspired, with “speed-line” background shots and the like. Fine for some, but not really something I care for.
The story, at least in the first issue, is good enough to make up for it, and I’ll be checking out this four-issue miniseries, premiering Nov. 5. (Why they didn’t try to squeeze it out just one week earlier, since this would have been a perfect Halloween comic, I just don’t know.)
Anyway, that’s my say on scary comic books. If there’s anything I’ve learned about you guys in the months I’ve been writing this column, it’s that you’ve got hundreds of opinions on great scary comics I completely forgot about. So share. What horror comics do you love? Why? And most importantly, are they readily available in trade paperback, because if you’re going to start telling me I should be reading Moore’s Swamp Thing again, there’s just no way I can afford the originals.
FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: October 22, 2003
Every eight years or so, regular monthly comic books (“monthly” is a loose term in this day and age, particularly when we’re talking about Marvel comics) reach an issue number with two big, fat zeros behind it. When these anniversary issues crop up there are really only two appropriate stories to tell: a big, status quo-changing epic, or smaller, contemplative tale that reflects on everything that has brought the hero of the book to that point.
Amazing Spider-Man #500 did the latter as good as any comic I’ve ever read. J. Michael Straczynski wrote a wonderful story about Spider-Man crawling up through his own past, facing his own greatest enemies, greatest fears and greatest failures, and ultimately finding something he has deserved all along. I am a sucker -- I’ll admit it, a huge sucker -- for stories that end the way this story did. It’s even more profound because of the characters involved. If anyone in comic books has earned the right to have a happy ending once in a while, it’s Spider-Man. This time, he actually gets one.
Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People's Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the novel-in-progress ”Summer Love” at Evertime Realms. He’s also the co-host, with good buddy Chase Bouzigard and Not-On-the-Internet Mike Bellamy, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcasts. E-mail him at Blake@comixtreme.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page.
Everything But Imaginary -- October 29, 2003
Ah, it’s Halloween again, and there’s so much to do -- buy candy, carve the jack-o-lantern, iron out the wrinkles in that French Maid costume you wear year after year (I still can’t believe your wife lets you get away with that) -- but as comic readers, we have an added benefit that those poor, deluded creatures who haven’t discovered this artform yet don’t get to experience. We get to take home some great scary comic books.
Horror comics, of course, have been around for decades, most notably with William Gaines’ EC Comics. Those classics, like Tales From the Crypt and Haunt of Fear, are the granddaddies of any horror comics you see on the stands today the same way every superhero title owes a debt to Superman.
EC Comics were effectively destroyed by the creation of the Comic Code, though, and while sci-fi and monster comics managed to cling to life for a while, horror went by the wayside, totally restricted by their inability to show blood, slayings, or even such relatively mundane topics as vampires and werewolves. (Yeah. The code was that strict.)
Oddly enough, I am not really a fan of horror that relies on blood and guts. I don’t find slasher flicks or gorefests particularly scary (although I occasionally find a way to appreciate them as camp). If I want to get scared by a movie, I want something subtle. Something where the implication of terror is omnipresent, but you aren’t confronted with it face-to-face until the very end, if at all. Stuff like the first Alien movie and Signs are perfect examples of this.
The same techniques just can’t work in comic books. Sure, you can avoid showing the monster, but that’s not enough. You can’t create the mood of sitting in a darkened theater or the feeling of creepy music curling up your spine, and while it’s true that a good artist can have an impact on the pacing of the book through things as simple as the size and shape of a panel, there’s simply no way to control the speed of a comic book the way the director of a movie can to build suspense.
Comic books have to find a different brand of horror, something more cerebral. Implying the existence of a monster isn’t quite enough. Implying the existence of a milieu, however, is.
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman has often been touted as a modern horror comic. I have to disagree with that. I think it’s a masterful fantasy, but I’ve never considered it to be particularly frightening, with the exception of the truly chilling Serial Killer Convention storyline. Efforts at Marvel Comics like Blade, Tomb of Dracula or Werewolf By Night often turn into glorified superhero titles. I’ve heard good things about Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, but I must confess, I’ve never read it. I know, though, that if I didn’t mention it I’d get a half-dozen posts asking how I could possibly write a column on horror comics without mentioning Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Thereby, you may all consider it officially mentioned.
But now let’s take a moment to look at some creepy comics I have read, and some pretty good ones at that. I was really relieved to learn that one of my favorite CrossGen titles, Route 666, survived what can only be termed “The CrossGen Implosion” a few weeks ago. This is a great little horror book about a girl on the run from demons disguised as the sort of monsters you’d see coming out of a 50s-era B-movie: werewolves and vampires and zombies and the like.
Clearly, this in and of itself isn’t really very scary in this day and age.
Writer Tony Bedard takes things one step further, though, by making the demons agents of some mysterious dark force that employs black ghosts, the spirits of particularly cruel or evil humans, to harvest purer souls at the moment of death. Our heroine, Cassie, has been somehow gifted with the ability to see the ghosts, as well as see through the human disguises the demons wear. She’s also recent discovered new powers she has over her adversaries.
Bedard has tapped into one of the primary fears of the human condition -- what happens to us after we die? It’s not like he’s the first person ever to deal with this idea, or even the first person in comic books to write about it, but combining it with a flavor of monsters that we are conditioned not to find particularly frightening anymore brings a new air of menace to them and creates a really unique reading experience. It’ll be hard to watch old Lon Cheney movies again without feeling just a bit of a shudder.
Also dealing with the classic “life after death scenario” is the upcoming Dead@17, written and drawn by Josh Howard, a product of Viper Comics. (The good folks at Viper were kind enough to send me a black-and-white preview of Dead@17 #1 for the purposes of this column. They are receiving, as a token of my appreciation, this lovely parenthetical acknowledgement.)
Howard’s a newcomer -- new to me at least -- but I rather liked this story of two teenage girls, Nara and Hazy, a pair of best friends with problems that seem typical enough for teenagers, but turn out to be rather unique when you delve below the surface. Nara, for instance, has problems with boyfriends -- what teenage girl doesn’t? But the reasons for her problems, as we learn in the course of the story, are not common at all.
Hazy has family problems -- sad, but not unique. Those problems are exacerbated, though, when Nara is brutally murdered by a man with a blade. (This isn’t a spoiler, folks, this is all setup, the sort of stuff you get in a trailer for a movie.) Hazy, trying to cope with her friend’s death, starts to learn things about Nara even she didn’t know before, and what begins as her search for answers turns into a battle for survival.
Howard employs a very iconic (some would say “cartoony”) style that is quite unexpected of a horror comic book -- in fact, when I first looked at the characters, all I could think was that they would have looked perfectly natural showing up in an episode of the late, lamented Clerks animated series. Amazingly, though, this style really works. My only caveat is that the action scenes in the book are quite clearly manga-inspired, with “speed-line” background shots and the like. Fine for some, but not really something I care for.
The story, at least in the first issue, is good enough to make up for it, and I’ll be checking out this four-issue miniseries, premiering Nov. 5. (Why they didn’t try to squeeze it out just one week earlier, since this would have been a perfect Halloween comic, I just don’t know.)
Anyway, that’s my say on scary comic books. If there’s anything I’ve learned about you guys in the months I’ve been writing this column, it’s that you’ve got hundreds of opinions on great scary comics I completely forgot about. So share. What horror comics do you love? Why? And most importantly, are they readily available in trade paperback, because if you’re going to start telling me I should be reading Moore’s Swamp Thing again, there’s just no way I can afford the originals.
FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: October 22, 2003
Every eight years or so, regular monthly comic books (“monthly” is a loose term in this day and age, particularly when we’re talking about Marvel comics) reach an issue number with two big, fat zeros behind it. When these anniversary issues crop up there are really only two appropriate stories to tell: a big, status quo-changing epic, or smaller, contemplative tale that reflects on everything that has brought the hero of the book to that point.
Amazing Spider-Man #500 did the latter as good as any comic I’ve ever read. J. Michael Straczynski wrote a wonderful story about Spider-Man crawling up through his own past, facing his own greatest enemies, greatest fears and greatest failures, and ultimately finding something he has deserved all along. I am a sucker -- I’ll admit it, a huge sucker -- for stories that end the way this story did. It’s even more profound because of the characters involved. If anyone in comic books has earned the right to have a happy ending once in a while, it’s Spider-Man. This time, he actually gets one.
Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People's Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the novel-in-progress ”Summer Love” at Evertime Realms. He’s also the co-host, with good buddy Chase Bouzigard and Not-On-the-Internet Mike Bellamy, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcasts. E-mail him at Blake@comixtreme.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page.