JohnLees
Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 01:35 AM
Hey folks! Funny how things work out. Just as I get round to my focus on horror in comics, I find fellow Project Fanboy columnist Steve Forbes is immersed in discussion of this very topic. He’s certainly had plenty of insightful things to say about the genre, so if you aren’t reading Bolts & Nuts, I highly recommend you start catching up. In “Week 51 – Horror Overview”, Steve had this to say about the inherent difficulty of writing a horror comic:
Then, there are the things that I think that are the weaknesses of comics. I think that straight novels and film easily beat comics in the realm of horror. In novels, you’re doing nothing but reading the words, without the benefit of pictures. In essence, you’re scaring yourself. In movies, we [now] have sound to help scare the crap out of us, to go along with the pictures.
Personally, I feel that comics nowadays fall down in scaring people because of the fact that, as creators, we’re taking the imagination piece out of it for the reader. They get to see exactly what it is we want them to see—without the added benefit of music.
Reading this got me thinking about the nature of the horror genre, and its relationship with the comic book medium. Is Steve Forbes right? Is the comic book medium, by its very format, just not suited to telling a strong horror story? Or are there certain approaches to horror that comics can in fact do better than any other medium?
Before we can answer this question, we must first take a look at the history of the horror comic, and look at how the genre has evolved over the decades. Of course, there can be no doubt that Tales from the Crypt makes the perfect starting point in such a discussion. The 1940s EC Comics series remains arguably the most famous horror comic ever, and numerous film and TV spin-offs have kept the Crypt Keeper and his demented brand of storytelling entrenched in the public consciousness. So I would love to start this week’s meeting with an in-depth analysis of Volume 1 of The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt.
Sadly, that’s not going to happen.
As it turns out, I couldn’t get a hold of the book anywhere. Totally sold out on Amazon, totally sold out on eBay, couldn’t find it at an affordable price anywhere else. I even sought out the collected edition on the floor at San Diego Comic-Con, and couldn’t find it anywhere. So, in the first piece of bad luck that would blight this column, I have to severely truncate my discussion of Tales from the Crypt.
So while it wouldn’t be right to talk about the content of Tales from the Crypt, I think I can talk about it’s impact. The series was a huge success, so much so that it sparked a boom in horror comics that has never been matched since. By 1953, nearly a third of all published comics were horror titles – superheroes had fallen out of favor, and horror was on its way towards becoming the dominant, flagship genre of the medium. But Fredric Wertham brought the ascent of horror to a rapid halt with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, with the violence displayed in horror books such as Tales from the Crypt marked as being especially guilty in the corruption of young American minds. As a result of Wertham’s book – and the senate hearings that stemmed from it – the thriving genre of horror was all but completely cast aside, and superheroes were back in the limelight – tamer and blander than ever before, lest anybody be offended. It would take decades for horror to find a foothold in the comic world once more.
I think one important series in the return of horror was Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo’s run of Spectre stories in Adventure Comics, later collected as Wrath of the Spectre. It’s intriguing to see the tension between two genres in Fleisher’s approach to The Spectre. On one hand, the book employs many traditional tropes of a superhero title, from the secret identity to the love interest. But on the other, the stories are very much constructed like your classic horror comic, a nostalgic throwback to the simple yet brutal morality of Tales from the Crypt. From what I’ve heard – and what little I’ve read – Tales from the Crypt often told stories about terrible things happening to horrible people, or at least stupid or reckless people. The Spectre is a character that adheres to this principle, targeting murderers for his brutal brand of vengeance, as the introductory narration of the opening issue explains:
But you needn’t tremble, gentle reader. Only the vermin of the underworld need fear…THE WRATH OF THE SPECTRE!
And this sets the tone for all that follows. The reader is put at an emotional distance from the events unfolding. We share the perspective of the writer, looking down at events from above, knowing in advance the horrible fate that awaits the antagonists – half the time the cover gives it away. Here, the reader seems to be encouraged to take a morbid pleasure from the ghastly punishments The Spectre devises for the killers he confronts. Take a look at pages 68-69 in the Wrath of the Spectre graphic novel, for example. This is arguably the most horrific of all the death scenes in the book, as our villain Zeke is turned into a mannequin, then thrown into a fire and slowly melted. However, everything up until this ghoulish retribution seems to be painting a case that Zeke is wholly deserving of such a fate, to the point where you’re itching for The Spectre to show up and give him a taste of his own medicine by the time the inevitable ending comes.
As a result, while the most overt horror elements in the books are these gory deaths, the emotional response is not so much fear as grim satisfaction, or even guilty laughter. In Peter Sanderson’s introduction at the start of the graphic novel, he remarks that editor Joe Orlando viewed Fleisher’s Spectre tales as black comedies. It would take John Ostrander’s later run with the character for weightier morality plays to be introduced, and for the readers to be somewhat taken out of the comfort zone provided for them here.
Historically speaking, the work Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo did with The Spectre in the 70s was definitely significant, as it played a big role in putting horror back on the mainstream comic stage. However, in terms of the discussion point for this meeting, whether it’s a case of the content being dated or just the story itself, I’m afraid Wrath of the Spectre does little to support the idea that comics can be genuinely frightening.
Now we’re going to skip past a couple of decades of horror’s evolution in comic books. To offer a brief summary, in the 80s, the previously-discussed birth of Vertigo opened the door for more adult content in comics, which among other things allowed writers to have sequences of horror that were more genuinely upsetting than what had passed for horror in comics before. Then, in the 90s, Todd McFarlane revisited the Spectre idea of combining the conventions of horror and superheroes, and for the briefest of periods, it seemed like Spawn was one of the biggest franchises in the comic world. That brings us to this decade: where does the horror comic stand now? To answer, I am going to take a look at one of the most popular horror comics of recent years – The Walking Dead – and explore the tools used to incite fear in readers.
But perhaps I am being premature here. In his introduction to The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye – the first collected edition of the ongoing zombie opus – writer Robert Kirkman proposes that The Walking Dead is not actually a horror comic at all:
So, if anything scares you… great, but this is not a horror book. And by that I do not mean we think we’re above that genre. Far from it, we’re just setting out on a different path here. The book is more about watching Rick survive than it is about watching zombies pop around the corner to scare you.
This immediately reminded me of a comment made by Steve Forbes in the “Horror Overview” article referenced earlier:
Then, you have the old standbys of horror in comics: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, possibly aliens, Satanic magic users, and elder gods. Oh, sure, there are others—maybe technology’s run amok or somesuch—but that’s really about it for hoary standbys that creators pull out time and again. The traditional vampire is so well-worn that it’s no longer scary, causing writers to make things out of whole cloth instead of doing research.
It would appear that the horror comic – if not the horror genre as a whole – has become more about choosing from a selection of familiar archetypes rather than actually scaring people, defined by convention rather than emotion. As such, Kirkman admits that while we might find The Walking Dead scary, it’s not a horror book because it doesn’t follow your typical zombie formula.
I think this is unfortunate, because – as Steve says above – these monsters have been overexposed to the point where they’ve largely lost their power to terrify. So by defining horror as a book that conforms to such cliché, you’re practically precluding stuff that’s actually scary from being recognized as horror. I venture to argue that, if we’re going to find comic book horror that’s actually scary, it will be through the creators doing something different. While it seems highly inappropriate to disagree with an author on the interpretation of his own work, I would argue that The Walking Dead is indeed a horror comic, and the most important horror comic running in America today. Not because zombies can be scary. Because people can be scary.
The key moment in the Days Gone Bye graphic novel comes three pages from the end, when hero Rick Grimes’ wayward partner Shane is shot dead by Rick’s young son Carl. Looking back, much of what has come before has all served to put the pieces into place and build up to this one pivotal moment. Right at the beginning of the book, a young boy knocks out Rick with a shovel, mistaking him for a zombie. In hindsight, already the ending is being foreshadowed. In the IGN article “The Walking Dead TV Wish List”, Jesse Schedeen makes this comment on the series as a whole:
Carl is a young boy whose gradual loss of innocence is perhaps the great tragedy of Walking Dead. It could even be argued that he, not Rick, is the most vital character in the story.
I’ve not read enough of The Walking Dead to offer my opinion on this assessment, but in referring to the loss of innocence, Schedeen touches on a crucial aspect of the book. I remember reading an article on the early works of Wes Craven that pointed out that, in both The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, the real horror comes not from the ostensive villains, but rather from the depths of savagery that the ordinary, decent protagonists resort to in fighting back against them. I think the same could be said about The Walking Dead. The zombies are a presence that is constantly felt, but they are ultimately a plot device. I think it has been forgotten that horror can be as much a genre of ideas as a genre of things that go bump in the night. And here Kirkman is exploring the very frightening idea of what humans are capable of when stripped down to their core in a fight for survival. And I’m not just talking about human monsters like The Governor who pop up in later volumes. I’m talking about the kind of ordinary, decent people Wes Craven used to like pushing to breaking point.
Throughout Days Gone Bye, we see the hardening of our various protagonists come in baby steps. We see it in Rick’s mercy killing of the flayed, legless zombie by the roadside. We see it when Andrea is forced to execute her sister Amy before she is turned into a zombie. And perhaps most chilling of all, we see it when the survivors abandon the dying Jim near the city, far away from their camp - by his own choosing, as his last lines indicate:
L—leave me. When I come back… maybe I’ll find—find my family… … …maybe they c—came back, too. Maybe we can be together again.
Jim watched his whole family brutally slaughtered by zombies, and the extreme trauma of this event has warped his mindset, even in his dying moments. All of our survivors have gone through traumas, and all react in different ways. Dale copes by finding comfort in the company of young women. Donna copes by closing up and maintaining a distance from the others. And this is only the beginning of their journey. As Kirkman emphasizes in his introduction, the steady deterioration of those who manage to stay alive is the story’s driving force:
With THE WALKING DEAD I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these events CHANGE them. I’m in this for the long haul. You guys are going to get to see Rick change and mature to the point that when you look back on this book you won’t even recognize him.
These characters all feel so rounded and so human that we quickly grow to care for them. So the growing despair surrounding their situation as they realize help isn’t coming, and the inevitable prospect of change and death awaiting them – the kind of things you take for granted in lesser zombie fare – here becomes something that gives us a knot in our stomach. And when the story does take a turn into “zombies eating people” territory, it is without fanfare or the usual genre stylings, attacks coming out of nowhere, the pace taking an unexpected lurch forward, leaving us readers as shellshocked as the protagonists. The Walking Dead is not a typical horror, and it works as a human drama as well. But still, it works as a horror, and it manages to be very scary.
But I don’t think we’ve managed to refute Steve Forbes just yet. Remember how I said its power stems from the notion of horror as a genre of ideas? Well, ideas aren’t exclusive to comic books. Kirkman could have told this story as a novel or as a film, and garnered chills the same way. The Walking Dead seems set to be adapted into a TV series for AMC, further underlining how this is an idea whose effectiveness transcends mediums. Yes, The Walking Dead is scary. But it’s arguable that it’s not through the tools of the comic book medium that it generates its scares. This is not intended to sell short Tony Moore’s engaging, expressive art. The sequence on pages 9-11 where Rick finds the mangled zombie by the roadside and is reduced to tears is just beautiful, capturing a moment of simple humanity that pages of prose couldn’t replicate so authentically. I am merely concluding that The Walking Dead is a comic book story that is frightening, rather than being a story that is frightening because it is a comic book.
In order to find a comic book that is at once terrifying and perfectly tailored to the medium, I had to search beyond American comics, and venture into the world of Japanese manga. The book I came up with was Uzumaki, by Junji Ito. However, despite ordering the book nice and early, it only arrived in the mail today. Hence why this column is so late in going up. The second piece of bad luck to blight this week’s meeting. So, going back to the question I posed at the start of this column, are their certain approaches to horror comic books can do better than any other medium? To answer that, we must first think about what the strengths are of the comic book medium in general. One advantage comics have is that just about anything you can think of can be drawn on the page, and brought to life before your eyes. Yes, we’re getting to the point where it seems anything is possible in movies too, but it’s not quite as seamless yet as it is in comics. Taking this into consideration, Junji Ito comes to the apparent conclusion that the best way to make horror comics truly scary is not by aping the conventions of other mediums, but relying on the power of the still image that is part of the inherent structure of comics, and creating some truly skin-crawling images.
The plot of Uzumaki, Volume 1 is utterly barmy. A town cursed by spirals! Try selling a shape as scary in a novel. And the movie adaptation seems to overcompensate with jump-cuts and loud noises, muddying the essence of the idea. But by combining text with visuals…. Ito created something which just scared the crap out of me. Take the double-page spread on pages 40-41, with Shuichi’s father warped into a giant spiral. See, that written down there just makes it sound silly. But when you see it, it’s horrifying. By the time giant sentient hairdos are engaging in battle in Chapter 6: Medusa, it becomes clear that story is not Ito’s priority here. A coherent, nuanced story is good, and can be scary. But in the medium of comics, the primal fear - the really effective, lingering scares – is evoked through image. It doesn’t need to be logical. Each chapter has a very simple set up, but the structure’s all done visually – visual motifs building and escalating into something nightmarish.
So yes, comic books can be perfectly suited to horror, and that horror can be frightening. It’s just that, too often, it’s not, because too many horror comics try to follow what’s effective in scaring people in other mediums. A book like Uzumaki is terrifying on a visceral level, because it plays to the storytelling strengths of comic books, making the art as important to the story as the words, if not moreso.
Meeting 13
Open Forum – did you go and buy a volume of DC Showcase or Marvel Essentials like I asked? Good. Have you been reading it? Great! For next time, I want you to tell me about your experiences reading this early material. I want you to talk about how the featured hero was presented to you as a reader – think about what it would have been like reading these stories at the time they were published, when they were released for the first time, what the writers were saying about this character for that audience. What has changed in this comic book title since the time of these classic stories? And what key elements of your chosen hero have remained constant?
Meeting 14
Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Volume 2
Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle
X-Men: Magneto Testament
Then, there are the things that I think that are the weaknesses of comics. I think that straight novels and film easily beat comics in the realm of horror. In novels, you’re doing nothing but reading the words, without the benefit of pictures. In essence, you’re scaring yourself. In movies, we [now] have sound to help scare the crap out of us, to go along with the pictures.
Personally, I feel that comics nowadays fall down in scaring people because of the fact that, as creators, we’re taking the imagination piece out of it for the reader. They get to see exactly what it is we want them to see—without the added benefit of music.
Reading this got me thinking about the nature of the horror genre, and its relationship with the comic book medium. Is Steve Forbes right? Is the comic book medium, by its very format, just not suited to telling a strong horror story? Or are there certain approaches to horror that comics can in fact do better than any other medium?
Before we can answer this question, we must first take a look at the history of the horror comic, and look at how the genre has evolved over the decades. Of course, there can be no doubt that Tales from the Crypt makes the perfect starting point in such a discussion. The 1940s EC Comics series remains arguably the most famous horror comic ever, and numerous film and TV spin-offs have kept the Crypt Keeper and his demented brand of storytelling entrenched in the public consciousness. So I would love to start this week’s meeting with an in-depth analysis of Volume 1 of The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt.
Sadly, that’s not going to happen.
As it turns out, I couldn’t get a hold of the book anywhere. Totally sold out on Amazon, totally sold out on eBay, couldn’t find it at an affordable price anywhere else. I even sought out the collected edition on the floor at San Diego Comic-Con, and couldn’t find it anywhere. So, in the first piece of bad luck that would blight this column, I have to severely truncate my discussion of Tales from the Crypt.
So while it wouldn’t be right to talk about the content of Tales from the Crypt, I think I can talk about it’s impact. The series was a huge success, so much so that it sparked a boom in horror comics that has never been matched since. By 1953, nearly a third of all published comics were horror titles – superheroes had fallen out of favor, and horror was on its way towards becoming the dominant, flagship genre of the medium. But Fredric Wertham brought the ascent of horror to a rapid halt with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, with the violence displayed in horror books such as Tales from the Crypt marked as being especially guilty in the corruption of young American minds. As a result of Wertham’s book – and the senate hearings that stemmed from it – the thriving genre of horror was all but completely cast aside, and superheroes were back in the limelight – tamer and blander than ever before, lest anybody be offended. It would take decades for horror to find a foothold in the comic world once more.
I think one important series in the return of horror was Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo’s run of Spectre stories in Adventure Comics, later collected as Wrath of the Spectre. It’s intriguing to see the tension between two genres in Fleisher’s approach to The Spectre. On one hand, the book employs many traditional tropes of a superhero title, from the secret identity to the love interest. But on the other, the stories are very much constructed like your classic horror comic, a nostalgic throwback to the simple yet brutal morality of Tales from the Crypt. From what I’ve heard – and what little I’ve read – Tales from the Crypt often told stories about terrible things happening to horrible people, or at least stupid or reckless people. The Spectre is a character that adheres to this principle, targeting murderers for his brutal brand of vengeance, as the introductory narration of the opening issue explains:
But you needn’t tremble, gentle reader. Only the vermin of the underworld need fear…THE WRATH OF THE SPECTRE!
And this sets the tone for all that follows. The reader is put at an emotional distance from the events unfolding. We share the perspective of the writer, looking down at events from above, knowing in advance the horrible fate that awaits the antagonists – half the time the cover gives it away. Here, the reader seems to be encouraged to take a morbid pleasure from the ghastly punishments The Spectre devises for the killers he confronts. Take a look at pages 68-69 in the Wrath of the Spectre graphic novel, for example. This is arguably the most horrific of all the death scenes in the book, as our villain Zeke is turned into a mannequin, then thrown into a fire and slowly melted. However, everything up until this ghoulish retribution seems to be painting a case that Zeke is wholly deserving of such a fate, to the point where you’re itching for The Spectre to show up and give him a taste of his own medicine by the time the inevitable ending comes.
As a result, while the most overt horror elements in the books are these gory deaths, the emotional response is not so much fear as grim satisfaction, or even guilty laughter. In Peter Sanderson’s introduction at the start of the graphic novel, he remarks that editor Joe Orlando viewed Fleisher’s Spectre tales as black comedies. It would take John Ostrander’s later run with the character for weightier morality plays to be introduced, and for the readers to be somewhat taken out of the comfort zone provided for them here.
Historically speaking, the work Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo did with The Spectre in the 70s was definitely significant, as it played a big role in putting horror back on the mainstream comic stage. However, in terms of the discussion point for this meeting, whether it’s a case of the content being dated or just the story itself, I’m afraid Wrath of the Spectre does little to support the idea that comics can be genuinely frightening.
Now we’re going to skip past a couple of decades of horror’s evolution in comic books. To offer a brief summary, in the 80s, the previously-discussed birth of Vertigo opened the door for more adult content in comics, which among other things allowed writers to have sequences of horror that were more genuinely upsetting than what had passed for horror in comics before. Then, in the 90s, Todd McFarlane revisited the Spectre idea of combining the conventions of horror and superheroes, and for the briefest of periods, it seemed like Spawn was one of the biggest franchises in the comic world. That brings us to this decade: where does the horror comic stand now? To answer, I am going to take a look at one of the most popular horror comics of recent years – The Walking Dead – and explore the tools used to incite fear in readers.
But perhaps I am being premature here. In his introduction to The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye – the first collected edition of the ongoing zombie opus – writer Robert Kirkman proposes that The Walking Dead is not actually a horror comic at all:
So, if anything scares you… great, but this is not a horror book. And by that I do not mean we think we’re above that genre. Far from it, we’re just setting out on a different path here. The book is more about watching Rick survive than it is about watching zombies pop around the corner to scare you.
This immediately reminded me of a comment made by Steve Forbes in the “Horror Overview” article referenced earlier:
Then, you have the old standbys of horror in comics: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, possibly aliens, Satanic magic users, and elder gods. Oh, sure, there are others—maybe technology’s run amok or somesuch—but that’s really about it for hoary standbys that creators pull out time and again. The traditional vampire is so well-worn that it’s no longer scary, causing writers to make things out of whole cloth instead of doing research.
It would appear that the horror comic – if not the horror genre as a whole – has become more about choosing from a selection of familiar archetypes rather than actually scaring people, defined by convention rather than emotion. As such, Kirkman admits that while we might find The Walking Dead scary, it’s not a horror book because it doesn’t follow your typical zombie formula.
I think this is unfortunate, because – as Steve says above – these monsters have been overexposed to the point where they’ve largely lost their power to terrify. So by defining horror as a book that conforms to such cliché, you’re practically precluding stuff that’s actually scary from being recognized as horror. I venture to argue that, if we’re going to find comic book horror that’s actually scary, it will be through the creators doing something different. While it seems highly inappropriate to disagree with an author on the interpretation of his own work, I would argue that The Walking Dead is indeed a horror comic, and the most important horror comic running in America today. Not because zombies can be scary. Because people can be scary.
The key moment in the Days Gone Bye graphic novel comes three pages from the end, when hero Rick Grimes’ wayward partner Shane is shot dead by Rick’s young son Carl. Looking back, much of what has come before has all served to put the pieces into place and build up to this one pivotal moment. Right at the beginning of the book, a young boy knocks out Rick with a shovel, mistaking him for a zombie. In hindsight, already the ending is being foreshadowed. In the IGN article “The Walking Dead TV Wish List”, Jesse Schedeen makes this comment on the series as a whole:
Carl is a young boy whose gradual loss of innocence is perhaps the great tragedy of Walking Dead. It could even be argued that he, not Rick, is the most vital character in the story.
I’ve not read enough of The Walking Dead to offer my opinion on this assessment, but in referring to the loss of innocence, Schedeen touches on a crucial aspect of the book. I remember reading an article on the early works of Wes Craven that pointed out that, in both The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, the real horror comes not from the ostensive villains, but rather from the depths of savagery that the ordinary, decent protagonists resort to in fighting back against them. I think the same could be said about The Walking Dead. The zombies are a presence that is constantly felt, but they are ultimately a plot device. I think it has been forgotten that horror can be as much a genre of ideas as a genre of things that go bump in the night. And here Kirkman is exploring the very frightening idea of what humans are capable of when stripped down to their core in a fight for survival. And I’m not just talking about human monsters like The Governor who pop up in later volumes. I’m talking about the kind of ordinary, decent people Wes Craven used to like pushing to breaking point.
Throughout Days Gone Bye, we see the hardening of our various protagonists come in baby steps. We see it in Rick’s mercy killing of the flayed, legless zombie by the roadside. We see it when Andrea is forced to execute her sister Amy before she is turned into a zombie. And perhaps most chilling of all, we see it when the survivors abandon the dying Jim near the city, far away from their camp - by his own choosing, as his last lines indicate:
L—leave me. When I come back… maybe I’ll find—find my family… … …maybe they c—came back, too. Maybe we can be together again.
Jim watched his whole family brutally slaughtered by zombies, and the extreme trauma of this event has warped his mindset, even in his dying moments. All of our survivors have gone through traumas, and all react in different ways. Dale copes by finding comfort in the company of young women. Donna copes by closing up and maintaining a distance from the others. And this is only the beginning of their journey. As Kirkman emphasizes in his introduction, the steady deterioration of those who manage to stay alive is the story’s driving force:
With THE WALKING DEAD I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these events CHANGE them. I’m in this for the long haul. You guys are going to get to see Rick change and mature to the point that when you look back on this book you won’t even recognize him.
These characters all feel so rounded and so human that we quickly grow to care for them. So the growing despair surrounding their situation as they realize help isn’t coming, and the inevitable prospect of change and death awaiting them – the kind of things you take for granted in lesser zombie fare – here becomes something that gives us a knot in our stomach. And when the story does take a turn into “zombies eating people” territory, it is without fanfare or the usual genre stylings, attacks coming out of nowhere, the pace taking an unexpected lurch forward, leaving us readers as shellshocked as the protagonists. The Walking Dead is not a typical horror, and it works as a human drama as well. But still, it works as a horror, and it manages to be very scary.
But I don’t think we’ve managed to refute Steve Forbes just yet. Remember how I said its power stems from the notion of horror as a genre of ideas? Well, ideas aren’t exclusive to comic books. Kirkman could have told this story as a novel or as a film, and garnered chills the same way. The Walking Dead seems set to be adapted into a TV series for AMC, further underlining how this is an idea whose effectiveness transcends mediums. Yes, The Walking Dead is scary. But it’s arguable that it’s not through the tools of the comic book medium that it generates its scares. This is not intended to sell short Tony Moore’s engaging, expressive art. The sequence on pages 9-11 where Rick finds the mangled zombie by the roadside and is reduced to tears is just beautiful, capturing a moment of simple humanity that pages of prose couldn’t replicate so authentically. I am merely concluding that The Walking Dead is a comic book story that is frightening, rather than being a story that is frightening because it is a comic book.
In order to find a comic book that is at once terrifying and perfectly tailored to the medium, I had to search beyond American comics, and venture into the world of Japanese manga. The book I came up with was Uzumaki, by Junji Ito. However, despite ordering the book nice and early, it only arrived in the mail today. Hence why this column is so late in going up. The second piece of bad luck to blight this week’s meeting. So, going back to the question I posed at the start of this column, are their certain approaches to horror comic books can do better than any other medium? To answer that, we must first think about what the strengths are of the comic book medium in general. One advantage comics have is that just about anything you can think of can be drawn on the page, and brought to life before your eyes. Yes, we’re getting to the point where it seems anything is possible in movies too, but it’s not quite as seamless yet as it is in comics. Taking this into consideration, Junji Ito comes to the apparent conclusion that the best way to make horror comics truly scary is not by aping the conventions of other mediums, but relying on the power of the still image that is part of the inherent structure of comics, and creating some truly skin-crawling images.
The plot of Uzumaki, Volume 1 is utterly barmy. A town cursed by spirals! Try selling a shape as scary in a novel. And the movie adaptation seems to overcompensate with jump-cuts and loud noises, muddying the essence of the idea. But by combining text with visuals…. Ito created something which just scared the crap out of me. Take the double-page spread on pages 40-41, with Shuichi’s father warped into a giant spiral. See, that written down there just makes it sound silly. But when you see it, it’s horrifying. By the time giant sentient hairdos are engaging in battle in Chapter 6: Medusa, it becomes clear that story is not Ito’s priority here. A coherent, nuanced story is good, and can be scary. But in the medium of comics, the primal fear - the really effective, lingering scares – is evoked through image. It doesn’t need to be logical. Each chapter has a very simple set up, but the structure’s all done visually – visual motifs building and escalating into something nightmarish.
So yes, comic books can be perfectly suited to horror, and that horror can be frightening. It’s just that, too often, it’s not, because too many horror comics try to follow what’s effective in scaring people in other mediums. A book like Uzumaki is terrifying on a visceral level, because it plays to the storytelling strengths of comic books, making the art as important to the story as the words, if not moreso.
Meeting 13
Open Forum – did you go and buy a volume of DC Showcase or Marvel Essentials like I asked? Good. Have you been reading it? Great! For next time, I want you to tell me about your experiences reading this early material. I want you to talk about how the featured hero was presented to you as a reader – think about what it would have been like reading these stories at the time they were published, when they were released for the first time, what the writers were saying about this character for that audience. What has changed in this comic book title since the time of these classic stories? And what key elements of your chosen hero have remained constant?
Meeting 14
Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Volume 2
Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle
X-Men: Magneto Testament