Month: September 2023

Help! Looking for horror comics from diverse voices

I read a bunch of new-to-me horror stuff every October, including short comics and single issues, but hoo boy is it real research to find horror comics that aren’t by white (and mostly American) men. I also try to pick out a comic or two from each decade for as far back as I can find them. I’m going through the process now of selecting this year’s comics, and while I’m confident I can find diverse voices and backgrounds for the comics I’ll read, I’m interested to see if any horror comic fans out there have recommendations.

So if you know horror comics and have recommendations from diverse creators, whether it’s people of color, or based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, or any other diverse background, lemme know! There must be a ton of comic creators right here on Tumblr that I’m missing out on. It can be a single issue, a story in an anthology, a web comic, it’s all good. Maybe there’s a horror Discord I outta join?!

As a bonus, here’s the list of horror comics I checked out last year:

“The Boar’s Head Beast” by George Wildman, Nicola Cuti, Wayne Howard (1975)
“I toyed with forces I couldn’t control.”

This has bits of Lovecraft but it’s mostly an adventure story, and that just reminds me that so much of the adventure stuff I loved as a kid is from the action subgenre of horror.

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“Ill Bred” by Charles Burns (1985)
“I realized her muscles were getting larger and more defined.”

The story seems to go full tilt into men’s panic about gender and sexuality norms until it pivots into a Twilight Zoneish wink at the audience as the plot resolves to an acceptable state for the normies. Pretty gnarly body horror stuff.

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“Don’t Go to the Island” by Sfé R. Monster & Kalyna Riis-Phillips (2016)
“The skulls at your feet are laughing at you.”

It’s been almost all white American men in my horror comics this month, so I’m pivoting to other creators and eras. Fortunately, the Bones of the Coast anthology has that and also focuses on the Pacific Northwest, undoubtedly my favorite region. It’s a good pairing with the Jackson story. A moody coastal vibe, the gray sky threatening something that doesn’t reveal itself immediately, but instead lingers behind trees and corners, watching and waiting.

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“Some Other Animal’s Meat” by Emily Carroll (2016)
“What if inside, it’s somehow the wrong stuff?”

Some inside part is always going to feel like it’s different from yours.

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“Greed” by Becky Cloonan, Jordie Bellaire, Travis Lanham (2013)
“Kindly take your place by the dead horse.”

I liked what I read here, but it’s clear it’s not meant to stand alone. It’s too brief and it feels like we’re (rightly) meant to read this entire book and perhaps the series before getting to this point.

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“Goin’ South” by Nancy Collins, David Imhoff, Jeff Butler, Steve Montano, Renée Witterstaetter, Electric Crayon, Simon Bisley (1995)
“He has his hate to keep him warm.”

People in the 90s really wanted to see these sorts of bouts between characters from different media properties. There’s an essay in the comic itself that comments on the fascination. Of course, this just presages our modern era of cinematic media universes. As for this first issue in a trilogy, it’s a decent setup, but not much happens since it’s focused on getting the two characters into the same room by the end of a single comic issue. I think a cross-country trip/spree featuring Jason could’ve been cool if it wasn’t so rushed.

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“Winnebago Graveyard #1” by Steve Niles, Stephanie Paitreau, Jordie Bellaire, Jen Bartel, Alison Sampson, Aditya Bidikar, Mingjue Helen Chen, Sarah Horrocks (2017)
“Where are the people?”

Ooh good setup here. I’ll return to finish this series for sure. I hope the big bad they introduce here gets a real powerful comeuppance, though it does feel like a setup for torturing some protagonists. Bonus points for a creepy carnival setting.

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“Seed” by Fiona Staples, Jose Villarrubia, Michael Dougherty, Todd Casey, Zach Shields, Marc Andreyko (2015)
“For this is not a woman but a demon with no soul to save.”

I remember Trick ‘r Treat being more jokey with its anthology format, but this was just a straightforward historical horror tale. But I liked the sincerity and will certainly return to this book later.

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“Kill Screen” by Lauren Beukes, Dale Halvorsen, Ryan Kelly, Eva de la Cruz, Clem Robins, Bill Sienkiewicz, Rowena Yow, Shelly Bond (2015)
“This better not end up in a bathtub full of ice with missing kidneys.”

Some of the writing here is cringey, but the character setup is intriguing. I’ll stick with it and finish the series after October.

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“The Fool of the Web” by Patricia Breen, Roel, Brenda Feikema (1997)
“Your belly quakes with laughter even as I tremble in disgust.”

Sometimes you follow the maiden, and sometimes the maiden follows you.

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“Fortune Broken” by Sandy King, Leonardo Manco, Marianna Sanzone (2015)
“Death runs from me, you old witch!”

A simple one, and too abrupt in its conclusion. A bit more time at the end and I might’ve been more into it.

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“The Cemetery” by Franco, Abigail Larson, Wes Abbott, Sara Richard (2022)
“Don’t you just want to get this over with?”

How do we learn to navigate the scary stuff? And why do some of us make it while others don’t?

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“The Speed of Pain” by Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, Dave Stewart, Steve Wands, Will Dennis (2018)
“I spent the week cursing God.”

Whoa nelly, this first issue is a great setup. It’s got that urban decay vibe of grungy industrial hellscape movies of the 90s like The Crow, Seven, and Dark City. I’ll definitely be coming back to finish this series.

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“Gestation” by Marguerite Bennett, Jonathan Brandon Sawyer, Doug Garbark, Nic. J. Shaw (2014)
“I’ll deal with the corpse, my lady-love.”

It’s very satisfying when men in power are absolutely wrecked by women, so I appreciate the still too-rare opportunity to see it happen. (And you should know that this short comic story was expanded into its own series.)

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“Chemical 13!” by Michael Woods & Saskia Gutekunst (2009)
“Everything is fine.”

Comeuppance stories about Nazis getting the wrath they deserve don’t hit the same anymore, not when they are just still around in daily life.

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“Hello, My Name Is…” by Nadia Shammas, Rowan MacColl, Licha Myers, Chris Sanchez (2021)
“Workers have names. Management has power.”

What is a name but a tracking system? The means by which to search and destroy.

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“Sea of Souls” by Jenna Lynn Wright, Alvaro Feliu, Juan Francisco Mota, Ricardo Osnaya, Erik Lopera Tamayo, Jorge Cortes, Robby Bevaro, Maxflan Araujo, Walter Pereyra, Taylor Esposito (2022)
“This isn’t the face I had when we met.”

The feel of a rushed committee affair, but stitched together adequately enough.

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“Crush” by Janet Hetherington, Ronn Sutton, Becka Kinzie, Zakk Saam (2018)
“His eyes are as wild as the sea.”

Aye, that’s a Gothic story alright. The foreword by Jacques Nodell that introduces the anthology was actually a really good breakdown of the Gothic literature genre and its trappings. The ending is pretty gruesome but then I think that’s also a tendency in the scary Gothic romances.

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“The End of All Things” by Natalie Leif & Elaine Well (2014)
“I’ll look at the lines myself.”

I wasn’t quite sure of the message here, and it’s probably a sign of a good story that I found it very compelling but wanted more. The ending evokes a sense of inevitable collapse beneath the weight of the world, that we are all inextricably linked to an entity we cannot escape.

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“Swamp Monster” by Basil Wolverton (1953)
“You stare in unbelief at what used to be normal hands!”

There’s something appealing about these old, simple morality horror tales. I suppose it’s knowing that someone’s getting a comeuppance, or a rude awakening. So reading these is about knowing they’re gonna get it and enjoying the twisted revelation.

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“The Portrait of Sal Pullman” by Lonnie Nadler & Abby Howard (2019)
“You fools, do you not see what this truly is?“ 

Abby Howard is the ruler of the kingdom of creepy illustrated faces. Er, maybe the architect. The wizard behind the curtain? Oh, the god, the god.

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“O Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M.R. James & Abby Howard (2019)
“If you see any more spooks or beasties, please do let me know." 

I often fantasize about illustrating text stories if I had the skill, just to visualize what’s in the brain. It’s cool to see Howard taking that on with one of these old timey and appropriately spooky stories.

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“Rainbow Sprinkles” by W. Maxwell Prince, Chris O’Halloran, Martín Morazzo, Nimit Malavia (2018)
“Arizona like in the movies of our dreams”

My first reaction was this isn’t horror (particularly after a more straightforward horror story in the first issue), but I think this is going to happen many times throughout the month. I’ve made the effort to seek out a more expansive range of voices and backgrounds in my horror selections and it’s going to require a broader acceptance of horror as a genre and medium for storytellers. All that said, this second issue of Ice Cream Man is more tragic and real, and horror fiction is, after all, a reflection of the horrors we face as real people.

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“Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall!” by Jack Davis, et al. (1953)
“Why do they scream when they see you?”

First-person perspective in a comic must have been a fresh thing in the fifties, and if you’re going to do it, then you may as well pull from a classic like Frankenstein. I also recognize this sort of amnesiac monster thing from many stories since ‘53, in particular the disturbing “His Silicon Soul” from Batman The Animated Series.

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“The Harvest” by Shannon Campbell & Pam Wishbow (2016)
“Just think of blackberry jam." 

Oh fuck yeah, that autumnal folk horror. Much of this sort of thing comes out of places with traditional seasons but I love that this anthology is all about horror from the Pacific Northwest, so here you can feel the gray gloom and green hells of those thickly forested areas. This particular story also gets into the insidious and unknowable machinations of plants. Who knows what they’re thinking…

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“In Each and Every Package” by Reed Crandall, et al. (1954)
“I kept thinking of you and that gave me the strength.”

This came up in a list of noteworthy horror comics from the mid-century due to this gnarly cover that got held up as an example of the questionable artistic merits of this sort of stuff at the time. I also doubted the horror qualities of this series since the title itself says it’s crime fiction, but I gave it a shot. It’s crime fiction for sure and I don’t think I’ll read other Crime SuspenStories, but it definitely feels like something I’d see on Tales from the Crypt.

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“Roots in Hell” by Richard Corben (2016)
“Have some of this mango. It’s delicious!”

Kind of an abrupt ending but I dig the conceit.

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“Mars Is Heaven!” by Ray Bradbury, Wally Wood, et al. (1953)
“And Lustig began to cry." 

Looks like this story hit pretty hard in the fifties, but then the Godliness and paranoia of the nation was more potent then. Now it comes across as quaint.

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“Save the Last Dance for Me!” by Dennis O’Neil & Pat Boyette (1969)
“Tin Toes makes the decisions around here!”

So many horror comics of this time are just peeks into the Ironic Punishment Division in hell.

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“Infected” by Bruce Jones, Richard Corben, Steve Oliff (1982)
“You drag a shaking claw across your mouth and wipe away the sour smelling bile.“

Whoof. The casual racism is real bad in this one, even if it’s portrayed just to show the shitty attitude and personality of the protagonist. It feels more like some white guys riding the wave of edgy work like Heavy Metal to paint a portrait of “those people” and a cautionary story about getting involved with “them.”

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[Image missing because Tumblr has a limit of 30, but here it is.]

“Unpleasant Side Effects” by Kerry Gammill, Sam F. Park, Mar Omega (2010)
“After I’ve recorded my findings, I’ll take care of this… thing.”

I liked seeing a modern take on the EC Comics comeuppance formula, and in particular an ending where the victims sorta get their due.

on storytelling and repetition

sprachgitter:

“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no
secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear
again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They
don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise
you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in.
Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen
as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you
will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know
who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to
know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and
Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that
the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that
tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we
stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks
into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We
know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we
are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present
we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s
the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more
questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every
new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement,
more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me
wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering
about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this
repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the
phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it
remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps
recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with
sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition:
the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no
anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less
power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us.
Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of
its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

jmechner:

Karateka Climbs Again

When the Digital Eclipse team told me they wanted to give my early game Karateka "the Criterion treatment" and re-release it in a deluxe remastered edition, I couldn’t quite picture exactly what they had in mind. Their enthusiasm and evident passion for video game history inspired confidence, so I said yes. I never in my wildest dreams imagined how far they’d take it.

The photo above captures my dad’s reaction as (age 92) he watches himself climbing up onto the hood of our family car forty years earlier. He’s wearing a karate gi at my request, in a Super 8 film I shot at age 18 to create rotoscoped animation for Karateka. (This was three years before I pressed my 15-year-old brother into service as the model for my next game, Prince of Persia.)

Digital Eclipse has reconstructed my Super 8 rotoscoping process — from film to pencil tracings to pixelated game character — in their interactive, hands-on “Rotoscope Theater.” And that’s just one element of “The Making of Karateka.” It’s packed with audio and video interviews with me, my dad, and game-industry luminaries; a podcast about Karateka’s music (which my dad composed); rare original design documents; excerpts from my journals; and 14 playable games — including not only the final Apple II, Commodore, and Atari versions of Karateka, but also work-in-progress builds I submitted to Broderbund along the way, tracking its development from prototype to gold master. All the games are playable on a choose-your-own nostalgic menu of period monitors and TVs, with optional audio commentary and a “watch/play” mode that the Dagger of Time would envy.

As a bonus, they’ve salvaged and resurrected my never-before-published arcade shoot-em-up Deathbounce (the game I made before Karateka, which teenage me hoped would be my ticket to software success in 1982)… and the one I did before that, an unauthorized Apple II clone of the arcade hit Asteroids. Incredibly, they’ve not only remastered Karateka, but also remade Deathbounce, using today’s technology to reimagine my 1982 prototype as a jazzy twin-stick shooter. All these are included and playable in “The Making of Karateka.”

If “The Making of Karateka” were an interactive exhibition in the Strong Museum of Play (from whose collection many of the archival materials came), it would require several rooms and a full afternoon to explore. Now, you can download, play and discover it at your leisure, on your favorite platform. Details and links are on the Karateka page on my website.

With this release, Digital Eclipse has set a new bar for game-development history preservation. I’m touched and honored that they chose Karateka as the first title in their planned Gold Master series. I can’t wait to see what comes next.