[KRISTY] VALENTI: I think there is a wolf cycle going on right now in indy comics; there was that werewolf anthology they put out at CCS.

[TOM] NEELY: I haven’t seen it.

VALENTI: I don’t know if it was the whole vampire-werewolf-zombie cycle or —

NEELY: I have no idea. I have specifically avoided reading most comics while working on The Wolf. Except for a few exceptions from friends, but I didn’t want to be influenced by anything contemporary or any external ideas. But I was very conscious of Twilight and all that stuff happening around me. And my mom was always like, “Oh, I think your book is gonna do really well, because everybody’s into werewolves and scary stuff.” And I’m like, “Mom …” And she’s like, “You should market this to the Twilight…” And I was like, “I’m not marketing my semi-pornographic book to teenage girls.”

[Valenti laughs.] That will get me arrested [chuckles].

It’s just a coincidence. It wasn’t any specific attempt to tap into that market, I was just off doing my own werewolf thing in my cave. And apparently there’s other stuff going on too — I didn’t even realize Jason did a werewolf story until somebody told me that the other day. So I haven’t really kept up with anybody [chuckles]. That’s what’s nice about finishing it, is now I’m getting to read all these books that I’ve avoided for the last five years. And someone else brought up that there’s a lot more sex in indy comics right now too. And I was unaware of that as well. Maybe there’s just something in the collective unconscious that’s leading us down that path. But it wasn’t any conscious attempt at being a part of that. I’m largely unaware; I guess there is a lot of it.

—Cartoonist and painter Tom Neely on pop culture and alternative comics’ mutual season of the wolf, in conversation with The Comics Journal‘s Kristy Valenti. He’s right — altcomix really are having a bit of a sexy time right now, and horror has gone hand in hand with that, for whatever reason. It’s interesting to think that even some of the artists responsible for this don’t realize it until they emerge from the trees enough to get a good look at the forest.

Valenti’s life- and career-spanning interview with Neely is a must-read, and not just because of insights like these into Neely’s wordless psycho-sexual-surreal-semiautobiographical graphic novel The Wolf, one of the year’s best comics. It paints a compelling portrait of how a restless and idiosyncratic artist can maintain a balance between pursuing his vision and the need to work with others — peers, publishers, day-job providers — to do so. His revelations about his failure to come to terms with Top Shelf for publishing his breakout book The Blot, the pros and cons of working as an animator for Disney, and his interaction with the alternative-comics scenes in Los Angeles and Portland all make for reading that’s both depressing and instructive. Check it out.

from The Wolf by Tom Neely

There’s not much I can say by way of an introduction to Tom Neely that the above image can’t do better. Combining the gangly, jaunty character designs of classic comic icons like E.C. Segar’s Popeye and Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse with a take on horror that’s equal parts metal album cover, ’70s horror mag, and sexualized Surrealism, Neely’s comics, paintings, and illustrations wed a high level of craft to intense imagery that often literally tears its characters apart. It’s a style Neely has deployed with surprising versatility since the high-profile release of his self-published graphic novel debut The Blot in 2007; in that time he’s riffed directly on his influences with the Popeye reinterpretation Doppelgänger and the horror-mag cover collection Neely Covers Comics to Give You the Creeps!, adapted the songs of punk mainstays the Melvins in Your Disease Spread Quick, created a series of strip-format comic poems in Brilliantly Ham-fisted, put an alternative spin on the gag comic in the anthology Bound & Gagged, and most famously helped craft an ode to the timeless love affair of hardcore legends Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig in Henry & Glenn Forever. I’ve enjoyed all these comics. But The Wolf, Neely’s new self-published full-length graphic novel, is the leader of the pack.

It’s easy to enjoy (if that’s the right word) The Wolf as a thrilling, chilling onslaught of monsters, bloody combat, and graphic sex — and indeed I do. But beneath the werewolves and zombies and tree-headed monks is a moving exploration of couplehood, as our male and female protagonists deal with the pain of the past and the threats of the present in order to build a (literally) brighter future together. As with The Blot, The Wolf‘s wordlessness emphasizes Neely’s powerful images, with a clever use of single splashes and double-page spreads propelling us through a story that at any moment can toggle between nightmare, wet dream, and peaceful reverie. It’s like life with the volume cranked up.

With The Wolf‘s release party scheduled for this Friday, July 8, at L.A.’s Secret Headquarters (although you can already purchase a copy through Neely’s website), Neely has provided Robot 6 with a selection of preview pages from throughout the book, and took the time to answer a few questions about its origins, influences, style, substance, subtext, sex scene, and more.

Tell me a little about the genesis of this project. How soon after The Blot did you know this was your next big thing? You’ve done many smaller — and in the case of Henry & Glenn Forever, sillier — projects since then; how did this come to be a full-length book rather than a mini?

The Wolf, like The Blot, grew out of some paintings I was doing. I had a solo show called Self Indulgent Werewolf at a Gallery in 2007 about 2 months after The Blot came out. So, I was already working out these ideas with wolves and sex and skeletons and stuff right after finishing The Blot. I thought I was gonna work on this other graphic novel I have written, but the wolves kept speaking to me and soon a story had grown out of these paintings and sketches that I thought could become a longer book. But the process for this book was a lot more abstract and intense and in a lot of flux, so it was taking a long time… meanwhile I needed some other “sillier” and fun projects to work on, and I kept myself entertained with Henry & Glenn and my comic strip poems and the Bound and Gagged book and other minis. I’ve always got too many ideas going.

The Wolf was originally intended to have a musical component provided by Aaron Turner, late of the metal band Isis. I see that Aaron blurbed the book, but I take it the comic element took on a life of its own?

After finishing the Melvins comic book, Your Disease Spread Quick, I got the idea of having a soundtrack for The Wolf, so I approached Aaron Turner and he loved the idea and offered to write music for a collaborative book and record co-release project. It was an interesting process to work with another artist this way, but eventually we decided that it wasn’t going to work. I think we both became personally attached to our parts in the collaboration, and we ended up on different paths, and it just didn’t make sense to release them together anymore. I think Aaron has a new House of Low Culture album out soon.

You seem to be working through your golden-age influences a bit less directly than you were in past works like The Blot. I still see Olive Oyl physiques and Floyd Gottfredson white gloves, but the links are otherwise much less direct. Instead I see a lot more continuity with the metal and horror illustrations you’ve been doing. Am I on the right track?

I don’t really consider myself a “metal” artist any more than I consider myself the “Floyd Gottfredson” cartoonist. I’m not really interested in honing a particular signature style. I’m always exploring and finding the best way to tell the story for each project I do. I’m conscious of wanting to evolve and try new things. I think the art in The Wolf is the way the story had to be told, and the same could be said for The Blot. The Blot was a book that needed to feel like an old comic strip. The Wolf is a different kind of story, and to make it comic booky wouldn’t work. I really just looked more within myself. I wanted to flush out the external influences and distance myself from my contemporaries and just get back to what’s in me. I found myself drawing more expressive and more anatomical and sometimes wanting to draw realistic, other times exaggerated… I just didn’t wanna give myself any restrictions.

As for the metal and horror, the metal world has embraced my work, and I’m very happy about that because I am one of them and it’s fun to draw those kinds of things. This freeing up of drawing ideas has crept into all my work recently. I’m just trying to get back to what I love about making art… and sometimes I think I was happiest when I was 14 years old, listening to Obituary and drawing skinny skeletal creatures and stuff.

So what were you looking at/reading/processing while working on this?

All kinds of things… I’ve spent a lot more time looking at pre-Renaissance art, German Expressionism, Japanese watercolors, more Surrealism, and a lot of horror comics. I actually haven’t been reading many new comics at all in the last couple of years. With a few exceptions, I haven’t kept up with what my contemporaries are doing. I’ve been looking more at the woodcut novelists. Otto Nuckel’s Destin was an influence on how I wanted to tell the story of The Wolf, but also movies like Vampyr and Night of the Hunter. I’ve been very interested in the art of Alfred Kubin. I’ve been devouring Prince Valliant and revisiting all my old Creepy and other ’70s horror comics. Reading lots of old werewolf books and lore. Lots of poetry – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Blake, Yeats… a book of dirty poetry by Aleister Crowley. William Carlos Williams. Lots of old horror and B-movies. And always lots of music – metal, punk, but also a lot of experimental and a lot of jazz.

In addition, I see a rougher edge to your line, which in the past has been classically clean. The brushstrokes are more in evidence, and it makes the art both a little warmer and a little harder-edged at varying points in the narrative. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your technique here, and how it was tailored to the project.

I was very focused on clean linework for many years, but it started to lose interest for me. I wanted to be more expressive. I don’t know how to talk about specific techniques. I’m more interested in what I can say with a line than how perfect a line is. And trying different kinds of lines to say different things. I left in a lot of pencil marks and mistakes, too. It didn’t feel right to clean it up. I wanted the whole thing to feel more painterly. Like you’re looking at a long narrative series of paintings instead of a comic book.

You also introduce color in a big way, from the spot color of the ghouls to the rhapsodic, abstract, sun-like colors of the sex scene to the full-color conclusion. At times it becomes the primary vehicle for your visual storytelling. The Blot, by contrast, was black and white, with a bit of spot color toward the end. Why did you introduce color as such a major player here? Were there any unique challenges you faced in making work for you?

I like using color when it’s necessary. Black and white is the basic structure you need to tell a story in comics. But sometimes you need color to tell it another way, or to add something to the story. In this book the colors are used symbolically represent various emotions from fear and anxiety to love and connection and peace. I flirted with some of these ideas in The Blot, but I think I took the idea to a new level in The Wolf.

You’ve never shied away from nudity in your work, but this is by far your most explicit depiction of sex yet. What’s interesting to me is that it cycles back and forth between graphically detailed, “anatomically correct” elements to big washes of color and line and movement–abstract, rather than illustrative, images. Can you tell me a bit about what you were going for with this scene?

I originally drew an entire graphic sex scene that was about 15 pages long, but when it was done it didn’t feel right. It reduced the sexual act to a pornographic illustration of sex, and I wanted to communicate something more than that. I wanted to represent the emotional feel of sex and connection in the abstract because the illustrated version seemed cheap and masturbatory. But I book-ended it with more graphic imagery to give the abstraction a context.

On a related note, frank depictions of sex are increasingly prominent in alternative and art comics right now — Powr Mastrs, Sock, Thickness, Celluloid, Brecht Evens’s work…Moreover, in very few of these cases is it presented in the sordid, squalid, or masturbatory light people might expect from alternative work. I know you really can only speak for yourself, but do you have a sense of why this might be?

I actually haven’t read any of those books you just mentioned (except the first volume Powr Mstrs and I don’t remember any sex in it?), [Tom is forgetting one of the great human/jellyfish sex scenes in comics history - STC] so I don’t know why sex may be emerging in indie comics. Maybe because the big push of the aughts in comics seemed to be towards literary and more intellectual comics. I get tired of the over-intellectualizing of comics. It’s fun and it has its place, and I overanalyze the crap out of everything, too… But when I get in the studio to work on this book I just want to make something more expressive and poetic and raw. Now I’m eager to check out those books and see what you’re talking about.

On the surface this may seem like an odd thing to say about a book involving werewolves, skinless zombies, and tree people, but there are elements in The Wolf that strike me as almost autobiographical in nature — dealing with past transgressions and reaching a state of, I dunno, healing or acceptance in the present. I don’t mean to pry, since obviously if you wanted to do straight autobio you would have, but I did at least want to point out that there’s more to this, emotionally, than horror and sex.

Yep… I believe all art is autobiographical at some level… but you know… sometimes with werewolves and skeletons and tree-headed monks and stuff.

You’ve been quite frank about the…I almost want to say “existential crisis” you went through after seeing Henry & Glenn Forever, the Rollins/Danzig slashfic gag collection you created with the Igloo Tornado collective, take off in a way that your more serious, personal, labor-intensive works had yet to do. Did that impact The Wolf in any way? Have you come to terms with it now?

Yeah… I’ve come around to being really happy about (and for) Henry & Glenn. It was a weird thing to be in the middle-to-end stages of The Wolf and see this other book, that I honestly think is the dumbest idea we ever had, become such a huge hit! But I’ve learned to just enjoy the weird ride. I always like to do different things with my art, and those things are going to appeal to different people. I had fun making Henry & Glenn, so it’s fun to see people enjoy it. I don’t expect even 10% of the Henry & Glenn fans to be fans of my other work. Maybe some of them will trickle over to The Wolf or The Blot or Bound & Gagged, but whatever… every piece of art has to find it’s own audience. I think the important thing is to not let any of this popularity influence my work. The popularity of Henry & Glenn isn’t going to make me spend the rest of my career chasing that popularity, but I won’t shy from it either.

We’re actually talking about doing a second Henry & Glenn book and I think it will be fun. Or maybe it will be a beaten-up dead horse. But as long as we’re having fun with it, why not?

What’s in store for you now that The Wolf is almost out?

Let me take off the artist hat and put on my PR hat: I’m having a book release party for The Wolf in LA at Secret Headquarters Comic Book Shop on July 8th. I won’t have a table at San Diego Comic Con, but I will be doing some Wolf signings with Decibel Magazine at the Nuclear Blast booth. And later I’ll be tabling at SPX and APE. I also hope to be doing some book tours with The Wolf in the Fall.

Hans Rickheit, who made Sean’s list of deeply creepy “alt-horror” cartoonists last Halloween, has just launched a new webcomic, Cochlea & Eustachea, which is even more surrealistic and deeply creepy than his slightly older (and much praised) Ectopiary.

On the About page, Rickheit notes that the lead characters have appeared in many of his other comics, starting with Chrome Fetus #5, but this is the first time they are getting their own comic. He only has two pages up right now, so it’s a good time to get on board.

(Via Scott McCloud.)

Eldritch #1

Back in April of 2010, writer Aaron Alexovich and artist Drew Rausch’s Eldritch! battled nine other webcomics to win the monthly competition held by DC Comics’ Zuda imprint. It was a hard-fought battle, and Eldritch! would ultimately earn the distinction of becoming the last Zuda winner, as DC shut down the competitions and ultimately the entire imprint soon after.

Eldritch! never had the opportunity to begin its run on the Zuda site, but that didn’t stop Rausch and Alexovich from pushing forward. A little more than a year after their victory, their comic is finally being released by the duo in various digital formats, including through Graphicly, comiXology and via the comic’s website.

The duo was kind enough to answer a few questions about and share some artwork from the new book. You can see even a longer preview on their site.

JK: Let’s start with a question about how this project initially came together. What made you guys decide to enter the monthly Zuda contest? And how did you guys know each other before all of this?

Drew: I was aware of Aaron’s existence from reading Serenity Rose way back when it was in single issues. I remember thinking “Man, this guy can write!” Seriously, each issue was a sequential novel. And I liked that. It had substance, wit and charm what with the “spooky” cute art. Eventually, I ended up asking Aaron to do a pin up for the second volume of my creator book Sullengrey. He and I just started chatting after that and found we both had a lot of similar tastes.

As far as entering the Zuda competition, that was a spur of the moment thing. David Gallaher, who was successfully writing High Moon for Zuda sort of planted the seed in my head. He basically sold it as the cool place where all the talented creators that mainstream comics didn’t know what to do with go. Around that time, Aaron had shown me some of the pitch work for a book he was going to do with DC’s MINX line before it got cancelled. What I saw was the perfect blend of Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone, which is right up my alley. I’m Drew Rausch and I have a tentacular addiction. Just can’t quit the stuff. I asked Aaron if he would want to rework it a bit with me and submit it to Zuda. That story eventually became Eldritch!

I’m not sure he has forgiven me yet for that.

Eldritch

JK: You guys were chosen as one of the 10 contenders by the Zuda folks, and go on to put in a lot of time and effort into the competition. You end up winning, but before you can enjoy the fruits of your labors, Zuda shuts down its competitions and, ultimately, DC shuts down the whole imprint. Did you guys feel slighted that you got the victory but not the spoils?

Aaron: Oh sure, I’d be lying if I said that didn’t feel like a knife to the gut. Not just for us, but for all the fans who really threw themselves into promoting the book, as well. There’s was a lot of RIGHTEOUS FURY out there for a while. But at the same time, I understand DC’s position. Big companies like that have stockholders to answer to, so if something doesn’t make sense financially, their hands are pretty much tied. The Zuda people did everything they could to keep us happy, though, by letting go of the rights with no fuss, giving us a little money, etc. I really appreciate that. I think what I learned from it all is that I’m much happier in the small, underground, vaguely disreputable world of indie comic-making. It’s just more comfortable here.

JK: Once Zuda shut down, they gave you guys the full rights back. What did you guys do at that point?

Drew: We had already started a good amount of the work for the first issue which we didn’t want to just throw away. Eldritch! had been received well by fans, I mean it had the highest amount of votes and unique page views in Zuda’s two year run, so there was a market for it. There were emails, Facebook and Twitter messages from fans bummed about the whole Zuda thing wondering if we were going to finish. Right after DC announced it wasn’t continuing with ZUDA, we were in contact with digital comic juggernauts Graphicly and comiXology and a few other publishers, wanting to pick up Eldritch!. Other former Zuda winners went the self publishing route, so Aaron and I thought we would help them build the tracks into uncharted digital territory.

Aaron: JUGGERNAUT TRACKS.

JK: Initially you guys created a webcomic for Zuda, but are now releasing it as a digital comic on the various platforms that are available nowadays, including your own website as a download. Did you have to do anything differently from a storytelling standpoint to switch from one format to the other?

Aaron: Nah, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between what we had planned and what we’re doing. I guess the Zuda thing was supposed to be two pages a week, as opposed to the “24-page comic every six weeks” thing we’re doing now, but we’re not approaching anything differently, story-wise. I mean, yeah, if you’re only putting out one or two pages a week, you might feel like every one of them has to end on a cliffhanger to keep people coming back, but I sort of write that way anyway. I always try to end each page with a moment that keeps pages flipping.

Eldritch

JK: So for those who missed it the first time around, what is Eldritch! about?

Aaron: Eldritch! is a horror book. A dark, brutal, MESSY horror book, but with a lot of humor built in… The story’s about Anya Sobczek, an angry punk-rock science major who discovers her teenage occultist brother is full of black tentacles and ancient, awful powers. There’s a lot of Lovecraft in it, obviously… Lots of monsters, lots of gruesome images, lots of peculiar behavior. I wanted something with a bit of that cool odd Sam Raimi/John Carpenter feel, where you’d have genuinely horrifying images and a real sense of THREAT, but you’re still laughing at the absurdity of it all. I love that kind of thing. It’s a hard balance to pull off, but I think Drew’s nailing it.

You know that scene in The Thing where the guy’s head tears loose and goes scuttling out of the room on spider legs? The “You’ve got to be fucking kidding” scene? Eldritch! is more or less “You’ve Got To Be Fucking Kidding: The Book.”

JK: What are some of your personal favorite horror comics?

Drew: Wow. Not shying away from the tough questions, are we? So many to choose from. I have a rekindled love for the old EC Tales from the Crypt comics. And I’m really glad that Dark Horse has been reprinting them. They’re a fun read and there is some stunning artwork in there. Some real gems. I appreciate the amount of gruesome scenes they got away with considering the time period.

Eldritch

I’ll tell you the first horror comic I bought was a Nightmare on Elm Street comic that I found in a cigarette shop, which was where I bought my comics as a kid. It was one of those over-sized magazine books that Marvel put out. I must have been 10 or so. It had this fully painted cover and all this detailed black and white interior. The last page was this splash of two girls sinking into Freddy’s steaming brain. I’m sure they were trying to make this overly sexual image but it was the ridiculousness that stuck with me.

One of my more personal favorites though has to be Charles Burns’ Black Hole. Never has a comic made me feel more uneasy after closing the cover then that book. Particularly due to his use of shadows and the way he drew expressions. The people ended up being more ugly then actual gory stuff.

These days, I look out for more of the obscure weird stuff. Not horror per se, but the weirder the better.

Aaron: Oh definitely, Black Hole is a masterpiece. His new one, X’ed Out, is pretty impressive so far, too. Just eerie and uncomfortable in all the right ways. I love being put off balance like that. And, obviously, I have to agree with Drew about the EC stuff. Jack Davis was a HUGE influence on me as a kid, and still is. It goes back to that balance between humor and genuine awfulness I mentioned before. Creepy and Eerie did some memorably disturbing stuff, too, especially when Bernie Wrightson was involved. I think my FAVORITE horror comic of the past few years, though, is Beasts of Burden by Jill Thompson and Evan Dorkin. That story about the ghost puppies is seriously one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever read. It’s brilliant.

Eldritch!

JK: What else are you guys working on?

Aaron: Serenity Rose Volume 3. It’s a comic I’ve been doing off and on since 2002, about a massively social-phobic witch who lives in this kind of supernatural tourist trap. It has a lot of the same feel as Eldritch!, but it’s a bit looser. More about building interesting characters than plot, I guess. This new one is a love story: “Break Your Stupid Heart.” Probably good to get outside my horror/monster comfort zone once in a while.

Drew: There’s a couple projects that I have in the works that are kind of exciting, and I’m hashing out the plot details for the third volume of Sullengrey with writer Jocelyn Gajeway. But right now, I’m mostly focused on Eldritch! and making the coolest looking book we can. Hopefully if it goes well, we’ll get to do more!

Aaron: Yep! Got at least two more Eldritch! books in mind. We WILL make those, one way or another. I’ve already picked out a nice, secure basement prison to keep Drew confined. Not too dirty!

JK: Is the story open-ended, or do you guys have a specific ending planned?

Aaron: I think these first six issues make for a pretty satisfying single story. If it ends there, I’ll be happy. There will definitely be some mysteries left unsolved, though… Enough to explore for another three or four books, I think. Should probably share some of those story ideas with Drew at some point.

"Nosferatu" by Dave McKean

John Rozum is known to comics fans primarily for his horror work, from the current Xombi and recent Hangman for DC Comics to creator-owned work like Midnight, Mass. and licensed comics like The X-Files and even Scooby-Doo. He’s also the World’s Biggest Halloween Fan. The holiday, not the movie. Though I supposed he likes the movie, too. I should ask him.

Anyway, Rozum’s started a new blog, The Grim Gallery in which he shares images from his extensive collection of horror photos and art. Like the Dave McKean piece above. It’s just getting started, so horror fans can catch up quickly, but Rozum’s updating daily, so there’ll be plenty to keep you coming back.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit stereotypical, but it gives me a chance to fill you in on this innovative new series that’s being previewed free online. Created by writer Geoffrey Wessel and artist Jeff Simpson, the soccer crime serial Keeper is a very strong piece of work with an very unique concept ripe for success.

The creators are serializing pages of the comic online every Wednesday while also building towards a full first issue for print release.The comic has gotten some good accolades from veteran comic creators like Phil Hester, Rob Williams and Jacen Burrows — with the latter describing it as a “sports horror hybrid”.

Both creators were on hand earlier this month at C2E2 showing off their book in the Web Pavilion. For more, you can visit their site keeper-comic.com

Back around Halloween ’09, I whipped up a little list of “six deeply creepy alt-horror cartoonists,” a list of modern masters of the macabre that included The Blot‘s Tom Neely and Ectopiary‘s Hans Rickheit. Now both artists are dealing with something even scarier than their comics: the economy. And both are looking for financial help to keep their projects going.

First up is Hans Rickheit, whose latest graphic novel The Squirrel Machine was published by Fantagraphics, and whose webcomic Ectopiary has had its praises sung by my colleague Brigid Alverson (among many others). Rickheit announced the other day that the business where he worked has closed down, leaving him without a job or income and forcing him to suspend production of Ectopiary indefinitely. “If you’ve ever considered buying any artwork or books,” he writes, “this would really be a very helpful time to do so.” You can buy pages from his Xeric-winning erotic-horror graphic novel Chloe here, pages from his steampunk-by-way-of-David-Cronenberg book The Squirrel Machine here, many of his comics direct from Rickheit himself here, or simply donate what you will here.

Next is Tom Neely, equally renowned for his hand in the viral sensation Henry & Glenn Forever (featuring the legendary romance between Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig) as for his gorgeously cartooned, self-published surrealist horror graphic novel The Blot. Neely is planning to go the self-publishing route once again with his just-completed book The Wolf, but he needs to dig up the scratch to do so first. With that in mind he’s offering several special sales and deals: Buy original art from projects he worked on for the band Isis here; buy pages from his comic collaboration with underground rock legends the Melvins, Your Disease Spread Quick, here; buy his prints at specially reduced prices here; buy a set of five of his comics at a specially reduced price here; and buy his books and prints directly from Neely himself here.

With your help, these two excellent comics creators will unleash new weirdness upon the world once again!

Kachoo raises a glass to Rachel in a C2E2 commission by Terry Moore

Big news over at CBR, where Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise, Echo) has announced his newest project, Rachel Rising, about a woman who has recently died but isn’t finished with life yet. Kiel Phegley zoomed in and got some details:

“This one will be ongoing because I’m developing a character and a whole world that I want a lot of open possibilities with,” Moore told CBR News. “I’m going for another genre that I love a lot. What I’m doing is that I’m still doing what I do with my character work, but like I’ve added a touch of sci-fi or what have you [to past projects], this one leans towards horror. And it’s not like gory horror or splatter. It’s more like, ‘This is not a town where you want to be on the streets at night.’”

I like it: The sort of horror that makes you uneasy, not grossed out. There’s more at the link, including a brief rundown of the premise of the story.

Everywhere

The webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE celebrates its fifth birthday today — congrats, guys! — by launching a new “tongue-in-cheek” horror comics anthology called Everywhere. The strip, created and written by Chris Miskiewicz, will feature artwork by Dennis Calero, Rodney Ramos, Bobby Timony, Nathan Schreiber, Seth Kushner and many more. The first strip, “Horses Everywhere,” is up now and features artwork by Andrew Wendel.

“Five years ago, eight independent cartoonists allied and presented personal signature works, online for free, and ACT-I-VATE was born,” said Dean Haspiel, creator of Billy Dogma and co-founder of ACT-I-VATE, in a press release. “Five years later, ACT-I-VATE expanded its roster, created a PRIMER graphic novel, and helped confirm publishing options between print and web. A bold example of how a curated destination point for new stories and ideas can sustain, ACT-I-VATE continues to break ground as the industry transitions to the Digital Age.”

Possessions, Book Two

Let’s get started with the first of many exclusive previews we’ll have for you today. Courtesy of our friends at Oni Press, we’re pleased to bring you a 15-page preview of the second volume of Possessions by Ray Fawkes. You might know Fawkes from such works as Spookshow, The Apocalipstix, Mnemovore and, of course, the first volume of Possessions.

The second Possessions features the return of Gurgazon the Unclean, a pit demon who looks like a five-year-old girl and is trapped in the Llewellyn-Vane House for Captured Spirits and Ghostly Curiosities. In this second volume, subtitled “The Ghost Table,” Ms. Llewellyn-Vane hosts a rival spirit collector and her collection of ghosts for dinner, and Gurgazon’s the main attraction.

You can find the preview and more information on the book after the jump; please note that the preview is an uncorrected proof. It’s scheduled to come out in March.

*****

Here’s the solicitation info from the publisher:

Possessions Vol. 2
IN PREVIEWS, ORDER TODAY AT YOUR LCS! – DEC10 1022

Writer / Artist: Ray Fawkes
Format: 2-Color, 5.5 X 8
Page Count: 72
Price: $5.99
Genre: Spooky Humor
Age Rating: Y – All Audiences
Comparison Titles: Cartoons like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and comics like Courtney Crumrin.
Description: Ms. Llewellyn-Vane is throwing a party and all the spectres are invited! Her House for Captured Spirits and Ghostly Curiosities is host to a rival collector’s gang of ghoulish guests, and Gurgazon’s the main attraction. But is the pit demon seriously expected to refrain from eating the visitors? DINNER!

Many thank to Cory at Oni for hooking us up!

Hellraiser #1 cover by Nick Percival

BOOM! Studios announced this morning that they’ve picked up the license to make comics based on horror writer Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. The new ongoing series will be co-written by Barker and Christopher Monfette and drawn by Leonardo Manco of Hellblazer fame.

In addition, they also plan to release Hellraiser: Masterworks Vol. 1, which will reprint stories from the Hellraiser anthology published under Marvel’s Epic banner. The first volume will include stories by Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Mike Mignola and Alex Ross, among others.

The complete press release can be fund after the jump.

*****

December 13, 2010 – Los Angeles, CA – This March, Hell comes to BOOM! Studios as master of horror Clive Barker writes the newest chilling installment of his signature creation with the new HELLRAISER ongoing series! Joined by co-writer Christopher Monfette and HELLBLAZER artist Leonardo Manco, Clive Barker’s HELLRAISER #1 features covers by Tim Bradstreet and Nick Percival. The release of HELLRAISER #1 ongoing will be joined that same month by HELLRAISER: MASTERWORKS VOL. 1, the first in a series reprinting the hard-to-find Marvel Comics-era Hellraiser stories. To herald the HELLRAISER: MASTERWORKS series, HELLRAISER #1 will be an epic, oversized 40-page debut that includes a story by THE MATRIX co-writer & co-director Larry Wachowski — ripped from the HELLRAISER: MASTERWORKS series.

The debut volume of the HELLRAISER: MASTERWORKS series sees a slew of spine-tingling Pinhead tales by such creators as Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Mike Mignola, Alex Ross & more, with cover by John Bolton!

“Beyond being a legendary creator of all things macabre, Clive Barker is truly an amazing individual and I’m proud to be able to work with him on reviving one of his most celebrated creations with HELLRAISER,” said Editor-in-Chief Matt Gagnon. “I’ve known Clive for years, but this is the first chance we’ve had to work together and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s been unbelievably gratifying to develop this series and witness the visceral, relentless, and shocking story that Clive has in store for a new generation of horror fans. Readers beware! Hell comes home this March!”

Clive Barker has “touched” HELLRAISER only twice before: once to write THE HELLBOUND HEART, and once more to write and direct the original HELLRAISER film. With the HELLRAISER ongoing series, witness Barker’s long-awaited return to tell a new chapter in the series’ official continuity—a trajectory that will forever change the Cenobites…and Pinhead! So prepare your soul for an epic journey into horror from one of the medium’s greatest voices, and starring one of the medium’s greatest characters, in an unforgettable new chapter of HELLRAISER.

Joining the HELLRAISER ongoing series in March is the debut of HELLRAISER: MASTERWORKS VOL. 1, a collection of classic HELLRAISER tales that will light your soul on fire! This must-have collection, originally published by Marvel Comics, features classic spinetinglers for die-hard fans and new readers alike, and collects a host of work from comic luminaries that you will not want to miss! Featuring the work of Clive Barker (HELLRAISER), Neil Gaiman (SANDMAN), Mike Mignola (HELLBOY), Larry Wachowski (THE MATRIX), Alex Ross (KINGDOM COME), Kevin O’Neill (LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN) and many more — including a cover by John Bolton! You will not want to miss this first volume in a series that will assemble the best HELLRAISER comics that have ever been!

HELLRAISER #1 ships as an oversized 40-page issue in March with A & B covers in a 50/50 split with art by Tim Bradstreet and Nick Percival respectively, as well as a very special 1-in-50 incentive cover with art by John Abrahamson and signed by legendary master of horror Clive Barker. HELLRAISER: MASTERWORKS VOL. 1 ships in March, featuring the works of Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Mike Mignola, Larry Wachowski, Alex Ross, Kevin O’Neill and more with a cover by John Bolton.

Correction: BOOM! Studios sent out a correction to their press release, noting that the 1-in-50 incentive cover will in fact be drawn and signed by Clive Barker.

Hellraiser #1 cover by Tim Bradstreet

Hellraiser Masterworks Vol. 1

Now here’s a novel idea for a horror comic. In Closed Caption Comics collective member Conor Stechschulte’s webcomic Two Broken Branches, a guy and a girl strolling through the dark woods one night have a choice to make: Stay on the road and plow on to their destination even though it might take them all night, or see if they can find some warmth and companionship at a nearby campfire even though it’ll take them off course. Stechschulte’s solution? Show the stories that emerge from both possible decisions, right next to each other — sticking to the road on the left-hand side, investigating the fire on the right-hand side. Suffice it to say that the tales diverge wildly and neither ends pleasantly, although you’ll have to read them to find out for whom. And both are drawn in Stechschulte’s sinister, shadowy, scratchy style. Check it out.

(via Noel Freibert)

This quietly sinister webcomic has been tearing up the comics Internet over the past few Halloween-dominated days, and for good reason. Presenting “His Face All Red” by Emily Carroll — a beautifully colored little nightmare with an ending as black as the background. When I finished it, I actually muttered “whooo” out loud, I was so impressed. Enjoy, if that’s the word for it.

(Via Tom Spurgeon)

To wrap up our Halloween treats today, our own Sean T. Collins and artist Isaac Moylan share a comic called “I Remember When the Monsters Started Coming for the Cars.” Check out the complete story after the jump.

*****

Orb

Happy Halloween! We round out our series of posts on what comics from the past or present left various creators shivering under the blanket until the sun came up. To see the previous posts, go here and here.

Fred Van Lente

I had the oversized MARVEL TREASURY EDITION of MARVEL TEAM-UP when I was a kid. The panel in the Spider-Man & Ghost Rider story in which the Orb removes his helmet and shows how hideously scarred he is scared me so bad I actually cut out a square of black construction paper big enough to tape over the panel to cover it so I could read the rest of the comic without looking at it. I couldn’t have been much older than seven.

Fred Van Lente is the co-writer of Marvel’s current event series Chaos War. He’s also written Action Philosophers!, Iron Man: Legacy and Shadowland: Power Man, among other titles. If you’re looking for something in the spirit of the season, check out his Marvel Zombies work.

Jesse Blaze Snider

I gotta say that 2005′s Marvel Knight’s GHOST RIDER mini series by Garth Ennis & Clayton Crain creeped me out so bad I couldn’t finish it. It featured a character who had his head shoved up his own ass and his bend spine sticking out of his back. Now, as I type that, it sounds kind of funny. It sounds like the exact kind of thing that you would expect the mind of Garth Ennis to come up with and normally I would be right their with you enjoying the amusing sadomasochism…but NOT when it is drawn by CLAYTON CRAIN! Something about the way he illustrates gore makes it a bit too real for me and triggers my gag reflex. I think its because everything looks WET…and sticky. I contend that if Clayton drew CROSSED you would vomit every issue…sometimes more than once! There are a number of twisted demons and monsters in this series that drawn by ANY other artist would have been a simply been a clever novelty, but as serviced by Crain they are Cthulhu level horrors that will give you bad dreams for weeks.

I’m telling you, guy with his own head shoved up his ass still makes me wince, though I feel I should be laughing. That mini should have been published through the MAX imprint.

Jesse Blazer Snider has written Toy Story and Muppet Snow White for BOOM! Kids, as well as Hulk: Let the Battle Begin for Marvel. On the creepy side, he also wrote DC’s vampire series Dead Romeo and Fangoria’s Strangeland: Seven Sins.

Neil Kleid

Black Hole

Years ago, breaking into the indie comix scene with my first minicomic, I attended a Baltimore Comic-Con to shill my one measley book, meet my colleagues, get some sketches. Quickly filled a sketchbook with as many cool cartoonists as possible, but pals kept urging me to approach this guy named Charles Burns. Charles was very nice, approachable and agreed to ink something up…and the end result was fairly eerie, fairly disturbing and honestly? Kind of phallic.

But the inks, the weight of his line, captured my attention and I wanted to check out some of his work so I picked up some BLACK HOLE.

And that’s when comics broke my brain.

Don’t think I can pick a single panel or part of the collected work that I can say “that scared the crap out of me”— but the overall loneliness, desperation and horrifying mutations throughout had me squirm and shiver. BLACK HOLE is so quiet. Like a meek, bespectacled serial killer waiting at the playground, luring you in with candy and then whisking you off to his private, darkened basement dungeon. The art, the acclaim and story dazzles you like light in a deer’s eyes on a midnight highway moments before a horrifying Mack truck knocks you off your feet.

Disturbing. Hushed. Terrifying. Lonely. Phallic.

Charles Burns’ BLACK HOLE: a graphic novel best read in daylight, brother.

Neil Kleid is the writer of The Big Kahn, Ursa Minors and Brownsville. He also contributed to Dark Horse’s revived Creepy Comics and Papercutz’s Tales from the Crypt.

Rick Remender

Arkham Asylum.

“Almost idly, I wonder where her head is. And then I look at the doll house.”

“And the doll house

Looks

At

Me.”

Rick Remender is the guy who turned the Punisher into Frankenstein’s Monster, and has written a lot of other comics that fit in with today’s theme: XXXombies, Fear Agent, Strange Girl, Doctor Voodoo, Sea of Red and The Man with the Screaming Brain, just to name a few.

Vito Delsante

I’m not scared very easily. Horror movies lack suspense, and unfortunately, a lot of horror comics do as well. When you’re dealing with page turns, it’s easy to kind of…prepare yourself for the shock that’s coming. And that makes it less shocking. The horror comics that work (30 Days of Night, Sandman, etc) have great premises and they execute well, but they’re not that scary because you’re still dealing with fantastic elements (monsters, the supernatural). The scariest things out there always have to do with something real. The Walking Dead is so effective because when you see a character like the Governor, you can imagine that if the $#!& hit the fan, that guy will exist somehow. But as compelling as Walking Dead is, and as real as it is at times, it’s still not the comic that scared the crap out of me. That was Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

Swamp Thing is a pretty fantastic concept (a swamp monster with the mind of a man) and as far as Moore took the concept, the scariest thing in it was the Aleister Arcane arc. Flies. Everywhere you looked, flies and bugs and larvae and…

I just shuddered writing that.

Hell exists, and it looks like THAT! I hate flies, and gnats especially, so when I read that…well, let’s just say, I was in Tuscon, Arizona in the summer and it was very very hard to turn off the bzzt bzzt bzzt in my ears.

Vito Delsante is the man behind FCHS and is currently working on a comic starring Dracula as a pulp hero.

Cullen Bunn

It’s Halloween, which means Robot 666 Week will soon draw to a close. But before we put the skeletons back in the closet and the bats back in the belfry, we’re pleased to bring you the debut of Cullen Bunn‘s latest short story, ‘The Best Costumes Are Homemade,’ starring, once again, Mrs. Friedly.

Bunn’s previous Mrs. Friedly tales:

• Gone Fishin’
• Friedly’s Treats
• The Silent Auction

The Best Costumes Are Homemade
By Cullen Bunn

Mrs. Friedly had been feeling quite festive, but the children were raising such a fuss that she was growing cross. She took a deep breath, though, and reminded herself that it was, after all, her favorite holiday. She refused to let it be spoiled. She picked a piece of candy from the bowl on the kitchen table and plopped it into her mouth. She instantly felt better.

But the children still whined and mewled.

“Now, now, my sweet ones,” Mrs. Friedly said, “I’m afraid this really is a necessity. I know you love the costumes we’ve made, but it is simply too cold out, and you must wear your jackets.”

The children moaned and sighed, whimpered and cried. Mrs. Friedly clucked her tongue as she gathered their jackets.

“Now, now. I know what you think. We worked very diligently on those costumes, and they are very scary. I realize you think that wearing a coat will ruin the illusion, but I can’t imagine your parents will approve if you come home with colds. I mean, look at you. You’re already shivering, each and every one of you.”

She offered the first of the children—Sara—her coat. Sniffling, the little girl slipped into the garment and shuffled off.

“There you are,” said Mrs. Friedly, “and you still look quite frightening!”

She handed jackets to little Billy and Gretchen and Scotty. The children screeched with disappointment as they pulled their jackets on.

“Now, that’s just about enough of that,” Mrs. Friedly said. “It’s Halloween, and you should be happy to go trick-or-treating. I still have to finish costumes for the other children.”

Mrs. Friedly looked over her shoulder. In the living room, the other children in her care—the children from the “wrong side of the tracks”—waited patiently while watching Charlie Brown. Misshapen shadows from the flickering TV screen danced across the walls.

“You know they are less fortunate than you,” Mrs. Friedly said, lowering her voice, “but you don’t see them complaining. Now, off you go!”

She ushered the whimpering children towards the door.

“Have fun!” she called, but she could hear them crying as they shuffled down the walkway.

Shaking her head, Mrs. Friedly shut the door and returned to the kitchen to finish the costumes for the other kids. The floor, she noticed, was a mess, covered in puddles of spattered gore and tracked around in four sets of bloodied footprints.

Those really were frightening costumes, she thought to herself. Perhaps I should have put plastic down. Oh, well. No use worrying over spilled milk now.

She sat at the table and set about stitching and patching together the four new Halloween disguises. Normally, she would have taken the time to clean the table up a bit before she got started. She, like her mother before her, had always been a clean-as-you-go kind of woman. But she could hear Charlie Brown coming to an end in the next room, and she knew the children would soon grow restless. She worked around the oozing, dripping blood and promised herself she’d make the entire house spotless once the holiday was over and done.

After a few minutes, she sat back and surveyed her handiwork. The new costumes were ready and—if she did say so herself—they looked terrific. She called to the children in the other room.

The kids shuffled and loped and slithered into the kitchen. Their teeth and fangs and mandibles clicked together with anticipation. They could already taste the treats they’d receive tonight, and saliva oozed down their chins, dripping to the bloody floor with all their other ichors and bodily secretions.

“Here you are.” Mrs. Friedly held up the first of the costumes for one of the children. “Tonight, you’ll be going as Sara.”

The child took the fleshy, sticky costume and pulled it on over its chitenous, roach-like shell.

“And you,” Mrs. Friedly said to the next child, “will be Billy.”

The second child took the costume, sniffing it hungrily.

“It’s not for eating,” Mrs. Friedly said, “at least not until after you’re done trick-or-treating.”

The third child wore the Gretchen costume, although Mrs. Friedly had to cut additional holes into the face for the extra set of eyes.

The final child had never dressed up for Halloween, but the Scotty costume Mrs. Friedly had made fit perfectly over his twisted, scaly body.

Mrs. Friedly clapped her hands together excitedly.

“Oh, don’t you look wonderful!”

Before her stood Sara, Gretchen, Billy, and Scotty, albeit stitched and bloodied versions of said children. They looked grotesque, that was for certain, but far less so than usual.

“And isn’t that what Halloween is all about?” asked Mrs. Friedly. “Pretending to be someone you’re not.”

She handed each of the children a plastic jack o’lantern and each, in turn, a slip of paper. On each scrap of paper was written an address.

“Sara’s home, and Scotty’s, and Gretchen’s, and Billy’s. I think their parents will be most thrilled with your costumes. Oh, how I wish I could be there to see the looks on their faces.”

The four costumed creatures shuffled out the front door—none of them wearing a jacket. They croaked, “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” as they moved along the walkway.

“Would you look at that,” Mrs. Friedly called from the doorway. “Someone left you some treats right in the front yard.”

Four crumpled, bloody, skinless figures were sprawled in the yard. Blood had soaked through their jackets, ruining them.

End

John Rozum

When I was a child the comic books I bought came in four varieties; Disney comics, Turok: Son of Stone, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth and what passed for horror comics in the early 1970s. These consisted mostly of the Marvel giant monster titles like Where Monsters Dwell, but also extended to anything that was the least bit spooky looking such as a copy of Marvel Team-Up that featured Brother Voodoo alongside Spider-Man, or pretty much any copy of Batman, or Mighty Samson.

I also read other horror titles such as Tomb of Dracula and lots of the anthology comics. No single story really leaps out to me as scaring me in particular, but some of the covers were things I had a hard enough time looking at during the day, let alone at bedtime. The covers were far stronger to me than anything inside the comic books. I think buying some of these comics was almost like a dare, to prove to myself that I could handle it, that I wasn’t too scared to take this image home with me. having it in my bedroom was like inviting the monster out from the closet, or under the bed where you could see it, and it could see you as well.

One of the covers I remember having that strange fascination/repulsion hold over me was the cover of Marvel’s Vault of Evil #13. Looking at it now, it’s hard to figure out why, but the big man who was obviously really mean, and the devil behind him, obviously meaner gave me the sense that whatever the story was that went with that cover should probably not be read. Of course I did, and it didn’t live up to the promise of the cover. The skeletal hand in the upper corner was an added bonus.

The EC comics were behind my time, but I did pick up Gold Key’s Grimm’s Ghost Stories fairly often. No single story comes to mind, but the witch who served as host to the stories within really frightened me. It was hard enough if she was in a little box at the top of the cover, but having her appear big on the cover was almost too much. Almost, but not enough to keep me from bringing a copy home with me. She reminds me of the blind housekeeper from the movie House on Haunted Hill (1960). I don’t know when I first saw that movie so i couldn’t say if the witch on the cover affected me so much because of the movie, or if memories of that witch made the housekeeper scene even more terrifying.

John Rozum is the creator of Midnight, Mass and Xombi, and has written everything from the X-Files to Dexter’s Laboratory.

Becky Cloonan

The last comic that really creeped me out was Ross Campbell’s The Abandoned. It’s a black, white and red zombie apocalypse gore fest, true to the classics in the genre. There were scenes in that comic that made me turn the page a little faster than I normally would have! It’s too bad Tokyopop dropped the ball on this one, it’s out of print and hard to find–but it’s a gem if you can get your hands on it!

Becky Cloonan, artist of Demo, American Virgin and much more, also did one of the stories in Pixu that is pretty scary. But don’t take my word for it; just read on …

Jamie S. Rich

The first thing to pop into mind when this subject came up was a fairly recent example. I am a big fan of Pixu by Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon, Vasilis Lolos, and Becky Cloonan, and I was particularly taken aback when I first read the self-published issues by one of Becky’s sequences. In chapter two, Omar returns home and something feels weird. Claire is acting strange. She made him some soup, and when he sits down to eat it, he notices something gross–a fingernail–in the broth. Then there is another, and another, and one in his mouth. It’s such a simple thing but the way Becky shows it, first by letting us see some nails on his spoon, then one between his fingers, and then finally spitting it out–it’s so visceral, I feel a tickle at the back of my throat just thinking about it. Over a few panels, she effectively creates an unforgettable moment, one that extends beyond the page and causes an honest-to-goodness physical reaction. It creeped me out so much, I had to send Ms. Cloonan an e-mail to thank her for disturbing me. The whole of Pixu is fantastic, but that’s the moment that really nailed it for me–no pun intended!

Jamie S. Rich is the writer of You Have Killed Me, Spell Checkers and Love the Way You Love, among other comics.

Ross Campbell

Pixu, Vol. 1

“I don’t think I’ve found any comics that really inspired fear or disturbed me. I’m not sure the medium is really capable of fright in the same way film or prose is, maybe because of reader-controlled pacing and the nature of illustrated artwork, or maybe it’s just because it takes a lot to freak me out, but one exception for me are Becky’s sections of Pixu, about the young couple. I thought her stuff in that had great sense of tense, almost oppressive foreboding-ness. It’s not “scary” in the conventional sense or whatever, but her part of the story has great dread and unease. Then you get to the fingernail soup part, and blecgggghh! It’s both unsettling and gross as hell. I think Becky is probably one of the only comics creators working right now, if not ever, who can really do stuff that goes beyond just drawing a monster or gore and calling it horror. Come on, Becky, do a horror book!”

Ross Campbell, as mentioned above, created The Abandoned, as well as Shadoweyes and Wet Moon.

B. Clay Moore

SWAMP THING #30

I don’t know how old I was when I first read it, but this was my first exposure to Alan Moore’s SWAMP THING, and, needless to say, it spun my head around. John Totleben and Alfredo Alcala on the art. All I knew was that the Swamp Thing’s human girlfriend seemed to be crawling through a fly-infested universe of despair and degradation, as something several steps above sinister seemed to have the world in its grip.

But the panel that snapped me to attention was a shot of the Joker, wearing a straight-jacket, staring ahead with dead eyes, drooling. A character commenting, “The Joker’s stopped laughing.”

There was more to the story than that, but I’d never stumbled across a comic book panel that more directly and succinctly summed up the horror of a situation. I got it, and it scared me. And even at a young age, I’m pretty sure that’s when it hit me that the storytelling potential of comics was a lot bigger than I’d previously realized.

B. Clay Moore is the writer behind Hawaiian Dick, Battle Hymn, The Leading Man and the upcoming Deadline from Kickstart Comics. He also has a really cool sketchbook.

from "The Roaches"

Last year for Robot 666 Week we had a lot of fun putting together our list of six comics that scared the $#!@% out of us. So this year, we thought we’d broaden our scope and ask a few comic creators what comics scared them. Here’s the first batch; check back tomorrow and on Halloween for more!

Jimmy Palmiotti

That’s an easy one.

In 1973, I read a short story in the black and white Monsters Unleashed magazine by Thomas Disch, adapted and illustrated by Ralph Reese called “The Roaches,” about a bug-infested apartment and the woman in it…all I remember was it was illustrated in such a creepy style and all those bugs…

At the time I was living in a basement of a house that had some of the little critters from time to time, and the story freaked me out to the point I couldn’t sleep, knowing the bugs were out there ready for me to fall asleep and crawl into my ears, mouth and nose. Now that I’m talking about it, it’s creeping me out all over again.

Jimmy Palmiotti is the co-writer, with Justin Gray, of a ton of comics — Jonah Hex, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, Time Bomb and many more. If you’re looking for a comic to read this Halloween, The Last Resort is a fun, over-the-top zombie comic.

Evan Dorkin

When I was ten years old, I was stuck in the house because I was sick. My friend Michael lent me two hardbound comic collections, which were rare creatures at the time, the time being 1975. One of the books was Superman From the 30′s-70′s, the other was the 1971 Nostalgia Press anthology of EC horror, suspense and crime comics. The only thing that stuck with me from the Superman book was a Bat-Mite vs Mr Mxyzptlk story. On the other hand, almost every comic in the EC book stayed with me, and completely freaked me out, to boot. I don’t know if the book gave me nightmares, but it gave me some daymares, thinking about three stories in particular which remained in my memory for years before I became re-acquainted with the EC material: “Shoe Button Eyes” (drawn by Graham Ingels, with a script by, I believe, Johnny Craig), “Foul Play” (script by Al Feldstein, probably co-plotted with Bill Gaines, art by Jack Davis), and “Carrion Death!” (Felstein — with Gaines most likely, art by Reed Crandall).

I don’t want to describe the stories and ruin them for anyone who might want to read them for the first time, but the first is a supernatural period revenge tale revolving around spousal and child abuse, the second features one of comics’ most infamous acts of dismemberment, and the last story is a grueling survival tale of a felon handcuffed to a cop he murders in the desert. All of these stories feature super-effective art, all of them scared me as a ten-year old, and they’re still three of my favorite EC tales.

As an adult reader and creator I don’t find that horror comics can actually be scary anymore, which is a bit of a shame to find out. The best that the medium can achieve, in my opinion, is to be disturbing, or at least creepy. Towards that end I particularly like Junji Ito’s work. Uzumaki, Gyo and the Tomie stories are all wonderfully disturbing, crazy comics full of outrageous ideas, WTF moments and bizarre visuals that stay with you long after you’ve closed the book.

Evan Dorkin has created a lot of stuff for comics and television. He’s the writer of Beasts of Burden (with artist Jill Thompson) for Dark Horse and had a story in the most recent issue of Bongo’s Treehouse of Horror comic, if you’re in need of any horror comics this weekend.

Rick Lacy

The Wolves of Saint August

I can remember quite vividly being spooked out by Mike Mignola’s Wolves of Saint August. I read it in a single night and can recall how creepy and cold those wolves heads on human bodies were. I remember being grasped from the beginning by the pacing. I knew something was going to happen. I suppose we all did, but you can feel it coming in that story. Something bad was cooking. There’s a great foreboding mood in that story… then it hits you with a werewolf skinning himself out of a human body. But the werewolf kept his humanity and when killed, died slowly without remorse for what he’d done. That alone was creepy to watch. It was agonizing and astonishing. A great tale based on an old myth that legitimately scared me to boot.

Rick Lacy is the artist of Labor Days by Oni, and also works on the Venture Bros. cartoon.

Ian Brill

The scariest moment I have ever read in a comic can be found in SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING Annual #2, written by Alan Moore, art by Stephen R. Bissette and John T. Totleben. I first read it in the second trade of Moore’s SWAMP THING run.

Swamp Thing has to go to Hell to find Abby’s soul. There he meets the villain Arcane. Arcane’s time in Hell is marked by hundreds of bugs using him as a hatching ground, so his body has become swollen and grotesque. Arcane asks Swampy how many years he’s been in Hell.

Swamp Thing tells him he’s been there since yesterday.

The hatching ground screams.

Ian Brill is an editor at BOOM! Studios, where he also writes Darkwing Duck and the upcoming Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers.

Thom Zahler

For me it was Tomb of Dracula #32. My parents would buy both my brother and I each a comic every week. John picked Tomb of Dracula #32, which I couldn’t understand. There were perfectly good issues of Superman and Justice League on the rack. Sometimes I think he picked the comics he knew I wouldn’t like.

And he was right. I mean look at it. Big scary Dracula jumping in to kill an old guy in a wheelchair, shouting “…tonight is the night you die!” Even the coloring was scary. Dracula’s lit with blue light coming from the side. It’s a little thing, but it was so unnatural, and the first time I remember seeing that.

Read it? Are you kidding? Wasn’t the cover enough?

Eventually, weeks later, I sneaked a peak at a page or two at a time, and always during the daytime. I remember Dracula being attacked by a dog and the dog’s collar having silver crosses, burning his hands. There were all sorts of traps and gadgets like that, and none of them really stopped them.

I can’t remember how it ended, but I know I read that far, because one of the scariest parts was that Dracula wasn’t killed at the end. Monster movies had the vampire get killed at the end, but this book… he got away to do more horrible vampire things, and he couldn’t be stopped. Heck, there was going to be another issue. And another after that.

But not for me. I didn’t buy another issue, and for some reason, neither did John. Maybe it scared him, too.

Until, eventually I checked out the Marvel Essentials collection. It was probably a good thing that Young Me never read those stories. Current Me, though, loved the heck out of them.

Thom Zahler is the creator of Love & Capes, which was previously self-published and will soon be coming out from IDW.

Kerry Callen

When I was a kid, my brother brought home an old, beat up copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not #25. I don’t where he got it. The cover was a painting of “Spring-Heal Jack”. As far as I remember, I had never seen a comic with a painted cover. It hit me as something I might see in a grade school history book, which seemed to validate Jack’s possible existence. The issue contained several stories, including one with a scary harpy/bat/witch, but Spring-Heal Jack had the most effect on me. The story contained only mystifying incidents with no real wrap-up. Plus, he apparently didn’t wear pants. I found it all terrifying, and I couldn’t help but imagine him jumping over tombstones whenever I was in a cemetery. Brrrrr.

Kerry Callen is the creator of Halo & Sprocket, published by SLG Publishing.

Cullen Bunn

Continuing our run of Halloween short stories by Cullen Bunn (The Sixth Gun), we’re pleased to present “Friedly’s Treats.” You can see the previous two stories here and here, and be sure to come back on Halloween for a brand-new story!

Friedly’s Treats
By Cullen Bunn

Joshua hated Halloween. He once loved costumes and jack o’lanterns and candy. But now he dreaded the holiday.

Outside, trick-or-treaters giggled and climbed Mrs. Friedly’s porch steps. The shuddering knock sent shivers down Joshua’s spine. He squeezed his eyes shut.

The door creaked open. Cool air swept the foyer.

Guttural voices cried, “Trick or treat!”

“Aren’t you fearsome!” Mrs. Friedly beamed at the anxious little monsters. “I’ve something extra special for you.”

Joshua squirmed as she lifted him, but the ropes around his hands and feet held tight. The gag muffled his screams. Grinning sweetly, Mrs. Friedly plopped him into one of the yawning treat bags.

“Oh, dear!” She pursed her lips. “I’m afraid I’m all out of treats. I don’t have enough for each of you.”

A disappointed groan rose from the beasties.

“Oh, I know!” The kindly-looking woman snapped her fingers and ducked into the house. She reappeared minutes later.

She dropped shiny treats into the other bags.

Wide-eyed, Joshua watched over the edge of the bag.

“Here you go!” Mrs. Friedly said. “Remember to share.”

Thanking the old woman, the hideously-masked trick-or-treaters skipped down the sidewalk, Joshua in one bag, butcher knives and meat cleavers in the others.

End

'Fourteen' by Kazuo Umezu

Horror comics fans have plenty of material to choose from when looking for a good, scary read this Halloween. Even if we just confine ourselves to manga (since, as we all know, the Japanese cartoonists excel at scaring the pants off their readers), there are plenty of options, from grand guginol pieces like MDP-Psycho or Ultra Gash Inferno, to more traditional, semi-bloody, spooky fare like Presents or Mail. Still, there are plenty of great, terrifying, mind-blowing manga that would delight the hardcore American horrorist if only some enterprising publisher would make an attempt at publishing them. Here are just six titles that I’d like to see translated and released in book form some time in the near future:

(Note: A potentially NSFW image lurks beneath the jump)

Chicken George, from 'Fourteen'

1) Fourteen by Kazuo Umezu. Umezu is regarded by many both here and in Japan as the king of horror manga, and with good reason. Few cartoonists are willing to work on such a primal, surreal level and pull as few punches as he does. His masterwork, The Drifting Classroom, still packs a visceral wallop even after repeated readings.

There’s been quite a bit of Umezu published in North America recently (Classroom, Cat-Eyed Boy, etc.), but not nearly enough to suit my tastes. Manga like My Name is Shingo and Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil remain unfairly ignored by folks like Viz. The one Umezu series I’m aching to see translated however is his last work Fourteen, (Umezu retired from manga after completing it). Fourteen is about nothing less than the complete and utter end of the world, brought about in large part by man’s utter disregard for the planet, but also by a mad scientist with a chicken head. Set in the year 2121, when pollution runs rampant and the planet is far too overpopulated, a hybrid man/chicken embryo grows out of a vat of bio-engineered foodstuffs. Calling himself Chicken George he vows revenge on all of humanity for their ecological crimes and starts by letting loose a zoo of deformed animals on a group of children and families. From there it gets really weird, as mankind suffers from insect attacks, volcano eruptions, birth defects, kids with green hair, toxic waste and air so bad that it melts people’s faces off. Epic in just about every sense of the word, Fourteen is Umezu at his most unrestrained, brutal and downright crazy. No doubt this fact bars some publishers from attempting to publish it, but a comic this insane and eerie deserves to be shared with Western horror  fans, if only to soak in the scene where the professional wrestlers that rip each other’s hearts out while in the ring before one sodomizes the other?

2) Museum of Terror by Junji Ito. Ito is no stranger to American readers, as his books Uzumaki and Gyo remain easily available in stores and are mentioned whenever the subject of horror manga creeps up. Dark Horse even put out a couple of volumes of his Museum of Terror series a few years ago, which collects all the various short stories he’s done over the years (the first two are especially notable as they contain the utterly creepy “Tomie” series). However, they stopped rather abruptly at Vol. 3, completely neglecting at least seven or so other volumes in this series. That seems almost criminal to me as Ito is truly one of the horror greats (his story “The Bully” in Vol. 3 remains one of the most deeply unsettling comics I’ve ever read). Certainly the popularity of books like Uzumaki would suggest that more of his work would find a receptive audience here.

3) Neo Faust by Osamu Tezuka. As the title suggests, Neo Faust, one of Tezuka’s last, and sadly unfinished, works, is a modern retelling of the classic Faust story of a man selling his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge. Here, a scientist on the verge of suicide is given a chance at a new life by a strange sorceress. Accepting her offer, he is thrown back several decades to 1958, transformed into a handsome young man, and given amnesia. From there he sets on a path of dark decadence and degradation, as he attempts to create life itself in the most Frankenstein-like manner possible. The little birds on my shoulder tell me that even unfinished it remains one of Tezuka’s darkest and most gruesome stories ever, which makes me all the more curious to check it out.

From 'Nijigahara Holograph' (remember, read right to left)

4) Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano. Asano is probably best known on these shores for his twenty-something slice of life manga Solanin. But many in the know claim that Holograph is his best work to date. A psychological horror story featuring a cast of deeply disturbed characters who interact with each other over the course of a decade (and presented out of chronological order) , Holograph features “attempted rapes, murders, extortion, sexual deviance, and a freakish explosion in the butterfly population,” according to Mangascreener. It’s surreal nature combined with sharp character observations have won plaudits from those who have read it. The fact that it’s already easily available in scantillation form makes it seem like a perfect candidate for publication.

From 'Ashura'

5) Ashura by George Akiyama. Set in medieval Japan during a terrible famine, Ashura caused a stir when it was first published in 1970 for its depiction of cannibalism, most notably in its opening sequence, where the title character’s mother, in a fit of hunger-induced madness, attempts to eat her progeny by throwing him on the fire. That scene alone got it banned in many prefectures. The series’ blend of black, cartoonish humor and stark horror and seems perfectly aligned for modern sensibilities. Hopefully that, along with the fact that Toei announced earlier this year that it plans on adapting the work into anime, will inspire an American publisher to take a chance on it.

6) Garden by Usamaru Furuya. Not every story in this anthology by the author of Short Cuts qualifies as horror per se, but I’m including it here because of the final story, “Emi-chan,” which, according to Adam Stephanides, takes up about half of the book. Split into a series of 16-page chapters, the story is starts with a young teen-age girl who comes across a dangerous murderer and sexual deviant in a dark forest and takes off from there, apparently getting more grisly with each chapter.

The catch is that each 16-page chapter is sealed shut, so that you literally have to take a knife to the book in order to find out what happens next. It’s this inspired bit of interactive formalism, forcing the reader to become complicit in the increasingly grim story, that makes me add this to my list. The story’s graphic nature and the fact that it involves sexual abuse of underage girls more than likely means that no American publisher would dare touch it. Still, one can always hope there someone out there willing to take that risk.

Thanks to Joe “Jog” McCulloch, Ryan Sands, David Welsh, Matt Brady and everyone else who recommended titles to me. Your help was much appreciated.