A Strange Death

As recently as in the last ten years, horror comics have represented some of the best and most challenging tales in comics. So why, with a few exceptions, does the genre seem so dead today? Nick Brownlow goes gravedigging.
21 June 2002

I have to admit to being something of a horror fan. When I was a teenager I read an awful lot of it, and it's quite possible that I'm scarred mentally for life because of it. On the plus side though, it kept me reading comics during those awkward, formative years when I was discovering girls and drinking, as I could quite painlessly make the transition from British SF adventure comics like 2000AD to the darker, more adult-oriented material coming out of the States at the time.

There was something of a glut of horror comics on the shelves back in those days; many of today's top creators got their big break writing horror around this time, and in the mainstream direct marketplace the genre was practically synonymous with the mature readers label.

Of course, market dominance of that kind is never healthy, and most mature readers' imprints have (thankfully) since diversified. I'm still a horror fan, however, and given the historical popularity of the genre, especially in these days of growing consumer demand for increased genre-diversity, I'm a little surprised to find myself asking... where are all the good horror comics? On the surface of it, and in the mainstream at least, it seems as if the genre has died a strange kind of death.

The state of the horror genre in the direct marketplace is undoubtedly in no small part related to the commercial collapse of literary horror fiction. After growing bloated and stodgy following its brief escape from the literary ghetto during the eighties, horror fiction fell out of favour with the paying public sometime after the dawn of the new decade, and is now once again largely relegated to the small press backwaters from whence it came.

This isn't the whole story, however. While the genre has floundered in print, the horror movie has been undergoing something of a (commercial) renaissance in cinema, with films like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE SIXTH SENSE and THE OTHERS all enjoying huge success at the box office. The fact that high profile projects such as THE EXORCIST prequel and the remake of the cult Japanese hit RING are in the pipeline shows that no one's getting cold feet about the genre in Hollywood.

So what about comics? Well, there are a few. People will immediately point to HELLBLAZER - still considered by many to be Vertigo's flagship title - as an example of a high-profile horror comic from a mainstream publisher. The problem is, HELLBLAZER hasn't really been a horror comic for a long time.

In his introduction to Titan Book's original collected edition of the title back in 1989, horror author Ramsey Campbell pointed out that the character of the psychic investigator isn't normally conducive towards the telling of a good horror story. They have a habit of explaining away what should be left unexplained, and bring a sense of comfortable, reliable stability to what should be a sickening lurch through the unknown. At the time, Campbell argued that the lead character of HELLBLAZER - occult detective John Constantine - managed to buck this trend by way of being a dangerous and unpredictable bastard that didn't always have your best interests at heart.

Can the same truly be said about him today? I would argue that Constantine is almost as familiar a character to comic book readers as Batman or Superman. We know that ultimately he's on our side, and we know that ultimately, both he and the world he lives in are going to survive whatever dramas the book's current creative team cooks up for him.

Others will probably point to Warren Ellis' line of black and white horror comics from indie publisher Avatar Press, which certainly sounds a lot more promising. The first of these, STRANGE KISS, introduced readers to the character of William Gravel - SAS Combat mage and occult commando for hire.

Gravel has since returned in two sequels, each with ever-escalating levels of gore and violence. STRANGE KISS, however, falls into exactly the same trap as HELLBLAZER by introducing an all-too capable central character who never seems to be particularly out of his depth in the bizarre situations he finds himself in. In his introduction to the collected edition of the first series, Ellis defines true horror as 'what you can't cope with', and yet the character we're intended to empathise with most in the story seems to cope ably.

Which isn't to say that either HELLBLAZER or STRANGE KISS are bad comic books; it's just that more often than not they come across less as horror comics, and more as superhero stories with a supernatural element. I could say much the same thing about most of the 'horror' titles coming out of the high-profile publishers at the minute - BLADE, HELLBOY, VAMPIRELLA... Why should this be?

There are of course, certain limitations and weaknesses inherent to the medium that create obstacles to the execution of a truly effective horror story. As juxtapositions of words and pictures, comics are often said to combine the advantages of prose and film. It follows then, that they must also be subject to some of their disadvantages as well.

As a visual art form, comics often lack the psychological depth of prose, as well as its ability to fully engage the reader's imagination. Visually, comics are on stronger ground and can make more of an impact; and yet at the same time they can't help but be eclipsed by the immediacy of film. If you can sit through someone cutting his or her own face off in a movie, seeing it in a comic book isn't likely to be particularly disturbing by comparison.

Still, this hasn't stopped people from creating effective horror comics in the past.

The true obstacles towards the telling of effective horror stories aren't weaknesses inherent in the medium as such, but rather in the way it's produced in the West - the practice of basing a book around a character rather than a story, and the dominance of the ongoing title. By default both require that a certain status quo be established - the foundation on which to build and continue the series indefinitely. This is anathema to the good horror story, in which the audience need to believe that the world they're reading about can violently lurch out from under their feet at any time - perhaps never to return to normal.

Given this, it's perhaps unsurprisingly that the two horror titles I've enjoyed most over the last few years have come from outside the mainstream US market. Junji Ito's UZUMAKI, serialised in Viz Publishing's PULP magazine (with two trade collections available so far) is a disturbing tale of entropic madness and obsession set in a small, fogbanked Japanese seaside town. Comprised of relatively self-contained 'episodes', in which we're privy to different aspects of the town's slow and insidious collapse in on itself, UZUMAKI is outlandish, visionary horror on a Lovecraftian scale.

Keeping the US end up, meanwhile, is Charles Burns's BLACK HOLE from Fantagraphics, which resembles an EC Comics adaptation of a David Cronenberg film. Teenagers living in an anonymous mid-seventies American town are slowly succumbing to a sexually transmitted disease that causes increasingly bizarre and horrific mutations to manifest on their bodies. Using the disease as a metaphor for the onset of adulthood, Burns has managed to craft a psychologically disturbing and compelling horror story of the type rarely seen in any medium, let alone comics.

In both these series the 'action' takes place in relatively mundane settings in which it becomes rapidly apparent that something is bizarrely wrong; anything can happen and usually does. There are no superhero or action movie trappings; the series' protagonists don't cope with or struggle against the supernatural events occurring around them, but rather, helplessly watch them unfold. Most importantly of all, both titles are finite series. They have an ending, and we have no idea whether or not it will be a happy one.

While new releases from the big publishers continue to look unhopeful and uninspiring, the fact that both the above series are enjoying a considerable amount of commercial and critical success gives me hope that the lessons they teach will filter their way into the mainstream. Perhaps horror comics have undergone a strange death; with any luck however, a strange resurrection could yet be just around the corner.

Nick Brownlow is an IT professional and writer.

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