Horror Roundtable - Week Thirty-Six
Name your favourite horror comic book.
Jeff O’Brien
“Hellhound” by Bruce Jones and Russ Heath in CREEPY magazine. You can read it here. I’ve never been moved by horror comics like I have in horror movies but in this one, the last panel caught me completly off guard - I was silent for a moment as I took it in.
Great twist ending, and logical too.
See now this is bad, because I’m one of the original Marvel junkies so MORBIUS, The LIVING VAMPIRE, TOMB of DRACULA, WEREWOLF by NIGHT, MAN-THING and all the rest really affected me deeply. The whole Marvel B&W magazine line was instrumental in my appreciation of things that go bump in the night. I can’t nail it down to one character, single issue, or series.
I realize now that they were trying to capitalize on the success of Warren’s CREEPY, EERIE , etc…but there was this wonderful melding of the superhero with the supernatural in those books that I still have to say “Make mine Marvel!”
(And for the record, I am equally smitten with Marvel’s Kung fu magazines. It was the 70’s, what can I say?)
Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat
Hands down it’s Black Hole by Charles Burns. One of my favorite comics of any kind, this de-romanticizes adolescent sex, drugs, and rock and roll more effectively than any other work of narrative art I’ve ever come across, like Dazed and Confused directed by Shivers-era David Cronenberg. It’s a masterpiece–I don’t say that lightly at all–and I can’t recommend it to fans of horror film or literature highly enough.
There is a strong runner-up, though, and that’s the three-volume manga series Uzumaki by Junji Ito. Its episodic vignettes suggest an HBO miniseries from the mind of H.P. Lovecraft, and it features some of the most indelibly terrifying images comics have produced. As I said in Wizard Magazine’s 25 Scariest Moments in Comics, I challenge you to take a look at the snail-boy and be able to go about your business shortly thereafter.
Billy
I loved the Hellraiser comic books. They were all these little short stories involving the cenobites and there were some fantastic stories. One that sticks out in my mind was one that took place in the Vietnam war. There was a series of foxhole tunnels and this one guy in the platoon was particularly good at clearing them out. So he goes in all by himself, killing everything in there. But this tunnel is in the pattern of one of the puzzlebox sides, so as he finishes killing the last of the enemy he ends up in hell because he just did something “perfectly” and doing something perfectly opens a gateway to hell. And then they proceed to turn him into a cenobite, but not before the last final shot of him rushing them to attack, even though he knows there is no hope.
Well this one’s a tie for me…
I was a big fan of both HELLBLAZER and THE SANDMAN…
Doug Nagy
I enjoy the Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery comics from Gold Key. I bought a slew of them at the Toronto Comic Con a few years back and enjoy reading them from time to time.
Wow, it’s really hard to choose just one! Overall, though, I’d have to say EC Comics in general have given me the most thrills over the years. The artwork is fantastic (I heart Jack Davis!), the stories are fun, gross, and sometimes even scary. I wish I’d been a kid when they first came around- they would’ve blown my mind.
Second place would have to be Tomb of Dracula, undoubtedly. I drool over Gene Colan’s artwork. ToD #69 was the first comic I ever got, and there’s a few pages inside (when some particularly ghoulish-looking vampires are trying to get at some little kids) that scared me absolutely shitless when I was young.
Any ‘70s horror books, from any company, are like crack for me- House of Mystery, The Witching Hour, Monster of Frankenstein, Werewolf By Night, Tales of the Zombie…the list goes on and on.
I could go on and on, even, all day long…great question!
David Z. - Tomb It May Concern
This question is impossible! Too many to list…so I’ll cheat a touch. For overall achievement I’m going to lump the original Man-Thing run once Gerber began writing it in Adventure Into Fear and up to the wacked out ending in Man-Thing #22 that featured Gerber himself as a reporter on Man-Thing’s adventures. The run is supplemented by the Monsters Unleashed B/W mag, including an excellent prose story by Gerber called Several Meaningless Deaths which is really one of my best arguments for prose n’ comics complimenting each other.
While Tomb Of Dracula is longer and total quality-I love the Man-Thing…and hey-can you say anything bad about people going to the shop and asking for Giant-Size Man-Thing?? No.
For more recent stuff everyone should be reading Tinnell/Livingston/Vokes’ Wicked West books. You can peep my review of WW2-Abomination here.
Damn Steven, this is impossible. I have stacks of old Charlton books I love, magazine boxes full of Creepy, Marvel mags (remember when Morbius could kick ass and Dracula could get it?) and great Eerie Publications like Witches Tales and Tales Of Voodoo. I adore horror comics-though mostly a bit older. Todays current trend of pencil squiggles buried in photoshop “coloring” make my head ache. I’m an old fart, I’d rather spend 5 bucks to get a random issue of Terror Tales than try something new, I admit it.
Alright, I’m not going any further, I’m compelled to go spend some time with DC’s Showcase volume of House Of Mystery now…
I’ve always liked the old DC Comics horror-themed House of Mystery and House of Secrets. I have one that has some really good stories, as well as one really sad one. My favorite in it has to be “The Loser”, which starts with a guy standing next to a coffin, talking to it, saying that he finally showed her that he could do something right. We’re treated to his past as he recounts it, where it shows how his wife dominated over him, even before they were married. Finally, after years of taking abuse from her, he decides to do away with her. He calls her to see something he was making in the basement, then rushes to push her down the stairs. We see a shadowy figure falling, and then cut back to the coffin, where the wife appears, laughing at him. He tells her not to laugh, and she tells him, “You’re pathetic. Don’t you remember? When you went to push me down the stairs, you missed!” and opens the coffin to show him laying inside.
I love all those old horror comics that were at mine and Steve’s grandparent’s cottage.
A lot of them were with these 3 witches (Witching Hour?). I can only remember the broad strokes of those stories, but I remember really loving them as a kid. I tried thinking of a specific story to talk about, but I don’t think any of them are fresh in my head enough to clearly recall. I enjoy those comics with three or more stories, with great twist ending. The covers of those books were always great too. Skeleton children, microverses hell bent on world domination, cat-god curses, that kinda thing. I don’t know why there aren’t more books out there like that anymore. They just make a kid’s imagination go nuts!
Yow!!! That’s a tough one, but I guess I’d better come up with an answer. Just about everything in Marvel’s Bronze Age horror boom is worth its weight in gold, as far as I’m concerned. Tomb of Dracula is probably too obvious a choice, but that’s for a very good reason–it really is that great. Now I’m about to commit Groovy Age heresy and say I especially love the Epic four-parter that came much later, in the early ’90s. It’s so much darker than the original, which isn’t necessarily a good thing, but here it really works. What impresses me most about it is the wild new way Colan draws Dracula, really emphasizing everything uncanny, metamorphic, and supernatural about him. Is this my “final answer”? Hrmmm . . . I wouldn’t go that far, but it’ll have to do for now!
I worked at a comic shop in the 1990s and read lots of comic books back then, but after I left I stopped keeping up with new releases. Here’s some of my favorites all published before 2000.
Vampirella - I love the original old 1970s Vampirella stories published by Warren. They were really entertaining and the cover artists and illustrators were fantastic.
From Hell - I thought Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s From Hell was an impressive & interesting take on Jack the Ripper. The story was smart and really pushed the boundaries of graphic storytelling.
Hellblazer - Jamie Delano & Garth Ennis both had amazing runs on DC’s Hellblazer, which was my favorite Vertigo title during the 1990s. After Ennis left Hellblazer the series seemed to loose it’s momentum and I stopped reading, but the early issues contain some of the best comic book writing I’ve come across.
Deadworld - I also have to mention the old indy comic Deadworld illustrated by Vince Locke and published by Arrow & Caliber. As far as I know it was the first “zombie” comic and the early issues were really terrific. I think it’s getting published by Image now, but I don’t know anything about the new series. The original Deadworld was really gritty and a fun read.
Elvira’s House of Mystery. It was my first horror comic when I was growing up as a kid, and even after discovering other titles, it still remains my favorite.
This Roundtable was brought to you in conjunction with International Read A Comic Book Naked Day, which takes place tomorrow. If you are without comics to read while naked and were looking for decent recommendations so you could take part in the celebration make sure you take a look at the list above or pop by tomorrow for even more comic goodness.
Thanks to everyone for sharing their horror comic memories. Please make sure you check out the various sites of our contributors for more four-colour action-packed blogging mayhem. Excelsior!
March 3rd, 2007 at 1:50 am
As a voracious comic reading & collecting child of the late ’60’s through most of the ’70s, I had a special place in my heart for all the monster & horror comics of the era. I loved ‘em all!
From the cheesiest of Marvel’s titles like MONSTERS ON THE PROWL & CREATURES ON THE LOOSE to their later classics like WEREWOLF BY NIGHT & TOMB OF DRACULA. Plus, their entire B & W line …
Not that I was limited to Marvel Comics by any means, DC had some good titles of their own in HOUSE OF MYSTERY, HOUSE OF SECRETS & THE WITCHING HOUR. Charleton had a couple decent ones too & I wouldn’t have dreamed of missing an issue of CREEPY, EERIE or VAMPIRELLA!
Not to mention the occasional issues of the more obscure ( & harder to find in my area ) other much more lurid B & Ws like NIGHTMARE, PSYCHO & WITCHES TALES etc..
What I consider to be the unsung classics of the era though, were all the Gold Key genre titles.
BORIS KARLOFF, RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, DARK SHADOWS … my parents bought ‘em all for me. I even enjoyed the hell out of the non-horror, sci-fi ones like STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE & TUROK, SON OF STONE because they had a lot of monsters in ‘em!
Sure, what you found inside of a Gold Key comic was never nearly as good as their awesome painted covers were, but I still couldn’t get enough of ‘em. And there were a couple of stories from the pages of RIPLEY’S that absolutely terrified me as a kid. One of which was my first exposure to the legend of the Bell Witch & the other the story of Spring Heeled Jack. I don’t know why, but after reading both of those stories I stayed awake all night long with my eyes open as wide as saucers at every little sound in out old house …
Good stuff indeed!
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I am convinced that you are trying to kill me. No, I am not paranoid.
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Happy Birthday Wintle. My life is a wasteland without you.
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:02 pm
T. Van - Just because I have three very thick dossiers on you and a corkboard full of surveillance photos does not mean that I am out to get you.
Nagy - Every time you comment on here it cracks me up. Only a handful of people that visit The Horror Blog know that my last name is Wintle. When you realize that, it makes it seem as if you’re a crazed hobo that pops on randomly screaming at your imaginary friend. Thanks for the birthday wishes. May the blood on your hands be the blood of a king.
Bluerosekiller - I love Turok. It is by far one of my favourite comics of all time. The one and only interview I conducted that managed to see the light of day was a talk with cartoonist Gary Panter that centred exclusively around the glory that is Turok.
http://tinyurl.com/2kjqt8
You may have to scroll down. I still consider that interview to be the greatest thing I have accomplished in nearly five years of blogging.
March 21st, 2007 at 2:51 pm
A lot of great picks.
I’ll recommend a few of my own.
Junji Itto’s Uzumaki was mentioned, and I want to second that.
Uzumaki is not just one of my favorite horror comics, it’s one of my favorite pieces of horror period. It ranks up there with my favorite horror movies(Suspiria, Kinski’s “Nosferatu”), and my favorite horror stories(H.P. Lovecraft). I don’t say this lightly. If you like horror, you should give it a read. Itto’s other works are worth a look too, but Uzumaki is his masterpiece.
Also in need of more recognition (outside of Japan) is Hideshi Hino. His “Hell Baby” (sadly out of print) book is great. Part Frankenstein like morality tale, part EC comic style gross out. A lot of his stuff has just come into print in english. a good place to start would be book one of the Hino Horror books from DH Publishing, “The Red Snake”. It’s got incestuous creepiness, pustulent boils, and a chicken lady.
My other two recommendations are North American.
The Walking Dead from image comics is top notch Zombie fiction.
I know a bunch of people who don’t read a lot of comics, who are addicted to this series.
Also in the Zombie category, but not as well known is The Abandoned from Tokyo Pop. It was meant to be a series, but now Ross Campbell(the creator) has parted ways with the company, so I’m not sure whats going on with it.
Book one works very well as a stand alone though.
you could be forgiven if you took a quick look, and wrote it off as a hipster/goth book, but the characters are very well developed(and act way more like teenagers than is usual for this kind of thing), and the story is intense, The art is very nice as well.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:33 am
I swas a lover of that Spring-heeled jack comic too. It had a gloriously creepy cover, and I would appreciate anyone who could scan the image for us to see [I sadly lost it in my youth]. It struck me as easily original and fascinating that it easily earned the right to its own movie. At times, I’ve even expected to see that one-eyed, bare-assed ghoul on the big screen. Someone please scan it in some site so we can get other comments on it.