Horror Comics

You totally want Julia Gförer's Too Dark To See and Flesh And Bone. (These are single floppy comics.)

Strongly seconded.

Also, see if you can track down some old copies of the squarebound anthology series Taboo. This was central to the post-Moore Swamp Thing era.

From Hell is the only comic wherein I have had to hastily flip past a couple of pages because I couldn't handle them. It's also my favorite thing Moore has ever done.

Worth seeking IMO is the old Warren mag Creepy. These are being reissued now, but expensively, alas. These scared hell out of me when I was a kid.

There will be a hardcover pretty soon collecting Kirby and Simon's BLACK MAGIC. This will be obligatory.

I hate Preacher (puerile) and Walking Dead (the art sucks).

never heard of it, but Edginton is an okay middling-level genre writer so...¯\(°·o)/¯

The whole Gene Colan run of Tomb of Dracula is pretty classic.

this new collection of corben's horror strips for eerie/creepy looks p good (dunno what the repro is like inside) and seems to be cheaper than the regular hardcover reprints. Really hope they do a similar volume for all of ditko's warren stories, some of his v v best stuff.

http://images.darkhorse.com/covers/300/20/20025.jpg

Scariest comics I know are by Rory Hayes, as collected in the Fantagraphics book WHERE DEMENTED WENTED - rory's jagged penlines seem to vibrate with existential dread:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rdLaRKhJXWY/SVtawi33lDI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/2GakFcU4B-g/s400/rory.jpg

if Fanta ever get to a Ghastly Ingels volume in their by-artist EC collections, there's a can't-miss classic (though beware generic 50s sexism)

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.

Taboo is full of good stuff. I wish I hadn't sold my #1, but I still have the other issues. I keep looking for Creepy and Eerie in, ahem, ones and zeroes format, but no luck yet.

Bernie Wrightson obvy

xp

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_aYRSFnxnhjU/SJszNVY4qGI/AAAAAAAAAgI/LXhDLgWjCVQ/s400/BerniWrightsonMasterOfTheMacabre2.jpg

recently I unearthed my copies of these - lots of great stories

http://www.tomheroes.com/images7/COMIC_bernie_wrightson_03.jpg
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRYxcx93WXEIgrRRZzc9i_Xs2OsJt6-25qdrhITLypJkv2jP83i5MvzjHzxBg
http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/600w/154/261541/5878031_1.jpg
http://images.wikia.com/pacific/images/d/df/Bernie_Wrightson_Master_of_the_Macabre_Vol_1_4.jpg

primarily reprints of Warren-era stuff iirc

horrible early computer colour on black and white strips, tho

? they had computer coloring in 1983?

Don't think it was computer coloring but fancier paper which yielded gaudier coloring. I'm pretty sure that computer coloring didn't become a big thing in comics until the very early 90s (kinda synonymous with the Image explosion.)

iirc the colouring on the pacific wrightson reprints (and lots of other pacific titles) was done by steve oliff, and this is what it says about oliff on wiki:

His company, Olyoptics, was one of the first to use computers to do color separation. Although other companies at the time were experimenting with computers, Oliff and his crew were the first to blend the color guide artist with the separator [3]

In 1987, the Japanese manga Akira was in preparation to be translated and published by Marvel Comics's Epic Comics line. Oliff was chosen as the colorist, and he convinced Marvel that it was time to try computer color.[4] After the publication of Akira in 1988, computer coloring became increasingly prevalent in the comics industry.

so while the colours may have still been handmade, i think the actual separation was already being done on a computer.

and computerised or not, the colouring just seemed really inappropriate over wrightson's very dense classical crosshatching

yeah Oliff was doing seps first, but that was what brought seps (as opposed to guides) under the control of bigtwo publishers on regular books for the first time

Danny Vozzo started using computers to colour at DC circa 1990, maybe late '89 - Sandman 19, Doom Patrol 26 or thereabouts?

Marvel famously bought Malibu lock stock just to get the computer colouring department that had done the Image launch titles

weird, I was in a comic book store over the weekend and happened across a stash of DC's unexpected. was a huge fan of these in my grade school years in the 70s. took a bunch of pictures of their hilarious covers.

and computerised or not, the colouring just seemed really inappropriate over wrightson's very dense classical crosshatching

I think it works for some of the strips more than others but yeah ymmv

Saw those on your FB, was delighted.

I keep looking for Creepy and Eerie in, ahem, ones and zeroes format, but no luck yet.

― Your sweet bippy is going to hell (WmC), Tuesday, August 7, 2012 11:31 AM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

crosseyed cyclops had the whole run of Creepy up a year or so ago. Links might be all dead now. I only snagged a few.

first sentence is xpost to edIII

I stump hard for Jamie Delano's Hellbazer run (the first 40 issues, and maybe the only run on the title that's at all essential). A good and effective approach to horror from a number of angles (personal, psychological, sociopolitical, satirical, straight-up gore and demon-y shit, and lots of slow-burn dread). I re-read it every couple of years and it never loses its verve.

Anything Al Columbia does fits the bill (e.g. The Biologic Show and that weirdly cobbled together Pim & Francie book). 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. He also did some work in the patchy Zero Zero anthology, which had some other decently horrific material in it (Henriette Valium's "The Head Reserve" comes immediately to mind).

From a certain perspective, everything Frank Woodring produces is a horror comic.

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.

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')

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, August 8, 2012 2:16 AM (12 hours ago)

yeah I was going based on the blog it was posted to, but they probably just misidentified an uncredited cover. cole's stuff is all over the place, and the cool things about that uncanny tales cover overlap with his better qualities (poster-like starkness, reliance on color). but the water detail def gives it away.

here are a couple cool cole covers

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/801743-MaskComics1.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/592785841_o.jpg

don't want to img bomb the thread, here's a stunning non-horror cole

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/2072893671_1f7f4e5e70_b.jpg

anyway cole could be crude but he could also kick ass

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/Mask2.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/terrorsofthejungle20fc.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/BLUEBOLT113.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/SPOOKSUSP25.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/ghostlyweird122.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/1231507-suspensecomics10.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/terrifyingtales13.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/1192522-BlueBoltWeird23114Front.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/947885-gw120.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/629647-terrors18_small.jpg

Great cover design, but one drawback -- at first I thought those footprints were, uh, gross objects falling out of Catsidekick's body. xpost

I guess that's another giveaway on that uncanny tales cover, cole's depth of field is not that well-developed. it doesn't matter much when he does stuff like that mask cover, which really pops.

also if cole did that uncanny tales cover the moon would be bleeding into the sea and the boat would be shaped like a psychedelic banana of death

here's a heath cover for uncanny tales, actually credited so we don't have to debate

what happened to harry? dunno, looks like he's into acid now

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/Uncanny48Heath.jpg

Holy shit, that one is amazing. I want a big poster of it!

sorry carl agatha if I turned this into the horror comics cover thread

Wow, those are great, great, great. Why are covers from sixty year old comics so much braver than what we're getting today?

all the discussion of swamp thing reminded me of my fave man-thing issue, night of the laughing dead, where the ghost of a clown who commits suicide helps man-thing defend hippies from rednecks

http://powerrecord.blogspot.com/2007/11/man-thing-night-of-laughing-dead.html

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

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/storyofdracula01.gif

http://powerrecord.blogspot.com/2008/05/story-of-dracula-wolfman-and.html

sorry carl agatha if I turned this into the horror comics cover thread

― vincent black shadow giallo (Edward III), Wednesday, August 8, 2012 9:52 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's okay! It will take me a million years to get around to reading all the recommendations that have caught my fancy so far, and these covers are pretty cool.

oh yeah, cole's work def has an elemental power and kick to it - see also ppl like jay disbrow:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4PAfibQR8xg/TgCiXOTshYI/AAAAAAAAR98/-KW6Kkx_AO8/s1600/1308664042scan0033.jpg

and matt fox:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VSiKZP_C_bw/TonwEP4kiCI/AAAAAAAAAJE/nBXDdEuL_lI/s1600/02_wtcov_1946_07.jpg

these ppl are def a big influence on those underground artists, like rory hayes or s clay wilson, who were well into their horror comix

Yeah, I'm sorry I questioned you on the whole computer coloring thing. I bow to your much superior knowledge of comics history.

And now I have a ton more names to look up and get into. There are worse fates.

lol p sure you and sic and forks and and others can kick my ass when it comes to knowledge of 'modern' comics

but the point, as always, is SHARING this shit

keep meaning to mention on this thread that kirby's SPIRIT WORLD mag has just been given the hardcover reprint treatment by DC, complete w/ the unpublished second issue. first issue featured some of kirby's last collage pieces - here's one of the originals (in the mag it was printed in blue ink only!):

http://www.whatifkirby.com/sites/default/files/comicpages/sw1_pgs2-3_a.jpg?1279079331

That was what, very early 1970s? Run it today and people wouldn't bat an eyelash.

these ppl are def a big influence on those underground artists, like rory hayes or s clay wilson, who were well into their horror comix

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, August 8, 2012 6:48 PM

if you took the 10¢ off the cover of cole's mask #1 and told me it came out of SF in '68 I'd believe it

yeah I saw that Kirby book in the store a couple weeks ago. pretty nuts.

While we're repping for Swamp Thing runs (and I agree that Millar's run was good, and among his best work), I'll go ahead and make this my 100th recommendation on ILC of Veitch's solo run, which was solidly horrific in that typically surreal Veitch fashion. And it crossed over pretty heavily with the (previously mentioned) Delano run on Hellblazer, which collectively makes for one of my all-time favorite chunks of comics.

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