horror
“Two roads diverged…”: Conor Stechschulte’s creepy Two Broken Branches
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)
- November 16, 2010 @ 02:15 PM by Sean T. Collins
One last taste of Robot 666: Emily Carroll’s ‘His Face All Red’
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)
- November 1, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Robot 666 | I Remember When the Monsters Started Coming for the Cars
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.
- October 31, 2010 @ 01:45 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | What comic scared the $#!@% out of you?
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.
- October 31, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | The Best Costumes Are Homemade By Cullen Bunn
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:
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.
- October 31, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | What comic scared the $#!@% out of you?
Like I said yesterday, we reached out to several comic creators this year to see what comics from the past or present left them with nightmares. Check some more responses out below, and check back tomorrow for another round.
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.
- October 30, 2010 @ 04:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | What comic scared the $#!@% out of you?
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.
- October 29, 2010 @ 04:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | Friedly’s Treats by Cullen Bunn
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.”
- October 29, 2010 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin
Collect This Six by 6 Now | Six horror manga that need to be translated
'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)
- October 29, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Robot 666 | A Weird and Scratching Beauty: The Art of John Coulthart and Call of Cthulhu
Lovecraft is a hard act to follow, and an even harder one to adapt. “Oh you mean HP Lovecraft, the guy who came up with Cthulhu and all those cute little plush toys.” Yeah, the guy who launched a thousand little cottage industries pumping out VOTE FOR CTHULHU: THE STARS ARE RIGHT bumper stickers and Mythos Hunting Guides and all that stuff. Yeah, him. I do wonder if he’d be tickled or appalled at his legacy and all the eldritch dust-catchers and t-shirts and radio plays.
Well, he’d probably like the radio plays. He’d probably have even approved of the silent film adaptation of THE CALL OF CTHULHU, arguably his single most famous piece of fiction, certainly the one that’s lodged most deeply in the collective consciousness, for good or for ill. The film adaptation ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478988/ for the IMDB page, and it’s streaming on Netflix) gets a solid recommendation from me, and anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m pretty hard to please as this stuff goes. Not because I think Lovecraft’s every word is sacred and perfect. I don’t. My relationship with HPL’s work is problematic, mostly in terms of the execution. I like characters. I like it when characters drive the plot. HPL couldn’t be bothered with that by and large, except when it was an incessant curiosity on the part of the players that made the eldritch secrets of the plot unfurl to their almost unerringly messy conclusions.
So I find HPL’s conceptual work rightly celebrated even if I find his prose nigh-unimpenetrable at times. Which is why I’m often attracted to adaptations of his work, where creators have a desire to stick to the template that HPL laid out, and often there’s some sense of respect for the source material, but it’s filtered through a different sense of aesthetics. HPL-inspired stuff that stars HPL himself? Not so much. Though there was that beautifully-illustrated LOVECRAFT OGN with art by Enrique Breccia that was so wonderful that I simply didn’t care about the story. Though I suppose there’s an interesting vein to mine when talking about Lovecraft as fictional construct rather than historical figure, but that’s for someone else to do.
- October 29, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Matt Maxwell
Robot 666 | Your video of the day: The Horror! The Horror!
This has to be the book title of the year: The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! The good folks at Abrams ComicArts have put together a pretty swell little trailer for this collection of pre-Comics Code horror and crime comics from the ’50s, edited and contextualized by Jim Trombetta with an introduction by Mr. Goosebumps himself, R.L. Stine. You can gather a couple of salient points from the video: 1) These things really were almost unbelievably lurid and gross, especially when you consider the relentlessly wholesome state of pop culture in general at the time; 2) Based on the video’s snippets from an anti-comic book TV report called Confidential File, which is included in its entirety on a DVD that comes with the book, men in suits took this stuff way too seriously back in the day.
- October 29, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Robot 666 | Take the horror home with Johnny Ryan
Exorcist print by Johnny Ryan
Fresh from perverting Small Wonder, Prison Pit‘s Johnny Ryan tweets that this is the last week you can buy art from his show at the Mishka NYC gallery. That means it’s your last chance to snag extremely affordable takes on an array of horror icons, from the Exorcist print above to pieces based on The Fly, Scanners, It’s Alive, Basket Case, H.P. Lovecraft, the Coffin Joe movies, Ryan’s own Prison Pit rogues and beasts, and much more. What are you waiting for, fright fans?
- October 28, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Robot 666 | Parasomnia, Part Four
Parasomnia
Courtesy of artist Greg Hinkle, we’re pleased to present the finale to his horror comic Parasomnia. Be sure to read the first three chapters (here, here and here) before reading the final one, which is written by Matt Silady.
Here’s what Matt and Greg had to say about this chapter:
“When Greg asked me to contribute to his horror anthology, I knew immediately I wanted to write a ghost story. So, here’s a little tale about an urban spirit who wants more than anything to rest in peace.
Happy Halloween!”
-Matt Silady (the upcoming The Delta of You, the Eisner-nominated The Homeless Channel)
“To be honest, when I asked Matt to fill out the roster on this book, I never thought he’d agree. I mean, he’s a very busy guy. So I figured my little anthology would be way down at the bottom of his list of priorities. Instead, he got right back to me, and we met up at the famous saloon, the Vesuvio, in San Francisco to discuss his piece.
Matt and I ended up working in the old Marvel style. He had an outline, with some rough layouts, and told me to work on the art, and he’d fit the story to the finished pages. It was great to have the liberty to help guide the story, but a little intimidating. I kept sending Matt thumbnails as I’d finish them, just to make sure I was headed in the ‘right’ direction. I wanted to blur the line between waking and sleeping a bit with the last dream, and Matt’s Ghost Story was exactly what the book called for.
Matt and Jason helped me tie up the ending as well, with an intense series of late night back-and-forth emailing. I had a certain ending in mind, and they helped talk me down from that clichéd ledge. Without their combined effort, and Josh’s lightning fast lettering, I don’t think I wouldn’t have had anything worth looking at.”
-Greg
This wraps up the comic, but tomorrow come back for Greg Hinkle’s illustrated Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. Print copies of Parasomnia are available from Greg’s Etsy shop.
- October 28, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
Robot 666 | Take aim at The Walking Dead with Jordan Crane, Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, and Jon Vermilyea
The Walking Dead print by Jordan Crane
Whoa. These are pretty much the last official promotional items I ever expected to see, but man am I ever glad I’m seeing them: Alternative-comics creators Jordan Crane, Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, and Jon Vermilyea have each created a Walking Dead print. Made to look like shooting-range practice targets, the prints tie in with Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (and Tony Moore)’s series, the television adaptation of which will make its debut on AMC this Halloween. Each print is signed by the artist and by Kirkman himself, emblazoned with the “Grant County, Georgia Law Enforcement and Public Safety” logo, limited to a run of 100, and priced to sell at $40. Best of all, each artist worked in his or her own inimitable style: Crane’s features linework so impeccable it actually becomes somewhat menacing itself, Ryan’s is spectacularly gross and upsetting, Vermilyea’s is a riot of squiggly detail, and Hanawalt’s has a cat’s head instead of a human’s.
The prints were curated by L.A.’s Secret Headquarters. Click here to see them all and buy them, but remember: If you end up using them for target practice, headshots only!
(Hat tip: David Paggi)
- October 28, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Robot 666 | The Silent Auction by Cullen Bunn
Cullen Bunn
As I mentioned earlier this week, The Sixth Gun writer Cullen Bunn has written a horror story starring an old woman named Mrs. Friedly at Halloween for the past few years. This year, to help us celebrate Robot 666 Week, Bunn sent us all three of the previous Mrs. Friedly tales to share with our readers, along with a brand new one that we’ll debut right here on Halloween.
So a big thanks to Bunn and Mrs. Friedly for sharing their Halloween with us. “Gone Fishin‘” went up on Monday, and you can read “The Silent Auction” below. Check back Friday and on Halloween to read more.
The Silent Auction
By Cullen Bunn
“My word, Mrs. Friedly!” Claire tapped the tiny, elderly woman on the shoulder. “I’ve never heard such questions in all my life!”
Mrs. Friedly turned and regarded her new neighbor over the rim of her round-framed eyeglasses. “What’s that, dear?”
“These questions–” Claire waved towards the gorilla-suited MC, who was busy reading trivia questions from a crumpled sheet of paper. Behind him, a banner was tacked to the wall. HALLOWEEN TRIVIA NIGHT, it read. “–They’re dreadful!”
Mrs. Friedly smiled sweetly and nodded.
“OUR NEXT QUESTION …” The MC’s voice, muffled beneath his ape mask, boomed over the microphone. “…NAME, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, THE VICTIMS OF JACK THE RIPPER.”
- October 27, 2010 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin