In the days when the scariest movies offered nothing more
potent than guys skulking around in scaly rubber suits, horror comics genuinely
shocked and disturbed. On their pages, eyes popped from skulls or were
punctured with sharp objects. Entrails spilled. Dripping things clawed out of
fetid graves. Horror comics were gross, they were goopy, they were ghastly— so
naturally kids loved them. Parents, however, found them disgusting and
deleterious. The horror comic issue (pun!) was of such significance that it clawed
its way right on up to a series of senate sub-committee hearings in 1954.
If you’re even a casual student of comics history, you
already know all this and have probably boned up on the topic (pun!!) by
viewing documentaries such as Tales from
the Crypt: From Comic Books to Television or reading books such as David
Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague. If
you’re pressed for time, you can also check out Michael Walton’s new book The Horror Comic Never Dies: A Grisly
History, which sprints through the history of horror comics in about 95
pages, understandably lingering on the horror comics scare of the fifties,
though not with Hajdu’s level of attention. I’m not sure if I learned anything
significant that I didn’t already know, but Walton’s telling of the tale is
sprightly and well-written. He uses his next 40 pages to provide conversational,
lightly critical synopses of numerous twenty-first century horror comics (and a
few films based on horror comics) that may inspire you to discover something
you’ve not previously read, though without examples of art this section is
missing a major factor for drawing new readers to comics.
