Aside from super-heroes, arguably the next most popular genre in the medium of comic books is horror.
As a kid in the seventies, I didn’t get a whole lot of horror comic books. In fact, only one comes to mind. Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery #65, with a cover date of December 1975. I was six.
I have no idea how this thing ended up in my collection. Even as a kid I had no idea how to file and classify it. As an adult, it took me forever to figure out what comic it was based solely on vague recollections of the cover. But I finally did locate it. And upon flipping through it, some of the imagery is memorable to me. Here are some examples:
Obviously, it wasn’t the kind of stories that strongly caught my attention.
As an adult, I grew to have a serious appreciation for horror movies and the horror genre. This appreciation led me to research any horror stories in my preferred medium of comic books. I found out all about EC comics and their headline title, Tales from the Crypt.
The EC comics have a strong role in the history of comics. Famous for quality and absorbing, gorey, gruesome stories, the comics themselves are absolute gems. They were hugely popular in the very early 1950’s, and they were the center of a storm surrounding comics and the idea that comic books were one of the primary causes of juvenile delinquency. The debates led to senate hearings, book burnings, self-regulation of the comic book industry, and the demise of EC comics. But I don’t want to get into all that here. It’s better covered elsewhere. If you’re interested, you can start here and here.
As great as the EC horror comics were, I never really found them all that scary. Maybe it’s because I was reading them as a jaded adult in the first decade of the 21st century and not as an eight-year-old in 1951. I heartily enjoyed them, but I didn’t find them scary.
In fact, I was under the impression that comic books couldn’t really scare me. I’ve recently learned different.
No discussion about modern day horror comics can be had without mentioning the Walking Dead. It’s a comic that my wife and I both enjoy immensely. Strongly adult, very engrossing, high quality stories told in the medium of a black-and-white comic book. The comic spurred a hit television show and is still being published monthly.
The thing that gets me about the Walking Dead is that I find a genuine surprise in every issue. Writer Robert Kirkman legitimately catches me off guard with at least one page-turn surprise per issue. The whole series is very disturbing for someone who’s most comfortable with super-hero comics of the seventies. At one stage in the series, it got to the point that I was afraid to turn the page for fear of what would happen next.
But this is a fear born of tension and anticipation, rather than legitimate fear. I was starting to feel a little jaded. It was like I was too old or exposed to find any true fear in horror comic books. I felt as if I had missed out. Is it possible for an adult who watches horror movies regularly to be scared by reading a comic book?
Recently I had heard about a series called Locke & Key from comic book publisher IDW. The series is written by a dude named Joe Hill. Hill writes both books and comics, and he absolutely deserves credit in his own right, so I won’t mention who his father is. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill_(writer)) The Locke & Key series had been recommended to me by a few different sources. So I finally broke down and bought the first collection.
It was a winter afternoon, I sat in the quiet sun room while the kids were off playing in another room and Lorie was working on her projects. Maybe it was a combination of focus, solitude, and the quality of the material. But reading this I found myself to be downright scared. Hill crafts a tale involving an old New England haunted house, a family recently devastated by a serial killer, and mystical keys that open doors in ways that no key on my keychain is capable of. The series deserves every inch of reputation it has and I intend to buy the rest of the collections. There was one image in particular that I can’t shake. And I’m very glad that I was able to put down the colorful adventures of my favorite super heroes for an afternoon and absorb myself in this horror story without distraction. It was quite the experience.
And now, unfortunately, I’m thinking.
I’m thinking that maybe that’s why I don’t seem to enjoy entertainment that much anymore. The focus. Between my ever-present To Do list, and the needs of my very active family I have very little opportunity to carve out a time for focused reading. I hope that particular state of being is temporary. I enjoy the way things are now and live in the moment. But I very rarely sit through a modern TV show or a modern comic without thinking about all the many, many things that I could be doing instead. It’s only the movies and comics of yesteryear, the stuff I’m already familiar with, that can distract me to the level of actually enjoying my entertainment.
Or… y’know… maybe I just think too much. That’s Lorie’s theory.
Thanks,
DCD
Sounds like you need to drink more. :-)
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