The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

As a ghoulish Halloween treat we thought the blog crew could have a rake through their repressed memories of terrifying moments from their comics reading. I’m a huge horror fan, from reprints of the old EC comics when I was a kid to Hammer films, then that first wave of Video Nasties during the home video revolution to the delightful creepiness of some of the new wave of very cool horror novelists (Joe Hill, Robert Jackson Bennet and the short stories in Black Static being especially stand-out – after being in the doldrums for ages horror writing is really making a come back).

But for me horror has always been more than a self-enclosed genre – of course there are works that are clearly horror, but elements of the genre have influenced many other tales in various mediums. Take Fincher’s sublime Seven for instance – the discovery of the Sloth victim, or the infamous ‘what’s in the box’ scene; Seven is a crime/detective tale, but it comes loaded with elements lifted wholesale from the horror toybox. So with that in mind we didn’t restrict ourselves to picking something just from a comic that would be labelled ‘horror’, but rather picked a scene that we considered horrific, a scene that created that frisson of genuine horror in us and that has remained stuck in memory every since. I’m sure you all have some choices of your own, so by all means share them with us in the comments.

Richard: I’d be terrible on one of those talking heads, 50 best… things. Joe emailed across asking what our fave horror moments in comics were and I sat for a moment and thought… and thought … and thought…

And my terrible memory completely failed me. Blank. Absolutely nothing came to mind. I know I’ve read some staggeringly great comics, and some have had truly horrifying moments. But put me on the spot, ask me there and then what they were… and nothing. Absolutely nothing comes to mind.

Even now, an hour or so of thinking about it and I can’t put my finger on many. Various stories in Bissette’s Taboo anthology seem to strike a chord, certainly bits in Moore and Campbell’s From Hell, and there must be more, there really must. But I’m settling on the one moment from my youth that really hit me hard as I read it, one even my failing memory can vividly recall…

Although my pick probably tells you a lot about me, and my relationship with horror. For me, it’s never been about gore or visceral fear. It’s always been about a deep, creeping sense of dread, of darkness falling slowly rather than immediately. Give me The Shining over Friday The 13th any day. About the most gorey I get is Carpenter’s The Thing, and even then, it’s the slow tension of the build-up that scares an fascinates the most. And in comics I always find that a lot of the comics that try to be horror, no matter how well they’re done, aren’t horrifying at all.

Not sure if it counts or not, but the one that really, really sticks with me is in Morrison’s Animal Man run…. where an exhausted Buddy Bradley returns home, on a peyote comedown, wondering what the hell just happened to him, what he really saw when he looked out from the comic book page and connected with a whole new world, and walks into his house…

Shock hit hard when I first read this in 1990, aged 19. To say it was completely unexpected is a huge understatement. Shocking, certainly. Horrific? Absolutely. Throughout the series Morrison had made certain we knew all about Buddy’s family, empathised with them, saw the love he had for them, and they for him. And then this. I think that counts as horror.

And just to add grief and despair to the horror, Brian Bolland’s cover to the next issue still ranks as a classic, one of the best he’s ever done in my opinion, and, in its own way, just as horrific…

Matthew: The Dead Man is one of the best stories that 2000 AD have ever run. Its script was credited to one Keef Ripley — a name that would never again grace the pages of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic — and it featured sublime, ‘career best’ artwork from John Ridgway.

The plot is fairly straightforward: a hideously burnt, and amnesiac, man is found by a group of settlers in the Cursed Earth (the vast, mutant-ridden atomic wasteland that surrounds Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One). His wounds are so severe they dub him the ”Dead Man’, but despite is grave injuries the Dead Man, swathed from head to toe in obscuring bandages, is nursed back to health, before deciding to embark on a quest to recover his lost memories by revisiting the spot where he was found.

The Dead Man is full of thrills and chills, and some of the most spook-tastic art ever. For example:

and:

But the sequence from the strip that will always stay with me is the one where Yassa Povey’s eyes are poked out by the monstrous fingers of… well, that would be telling, especially as the mysterious Dead Man and his story lead directly into a much larger 2000 AD strip featuring a much better known character further down the line. Yassa is a young villager who becomes slightly obsessed by the ‘Dead Man’ and follows him on his quest, despite warnings not to:

Years later, the above image still freaks me out.

NB: These scans were shamelessly borrowed from the Meanwhile, on the Dark Side of the Moon blog. There’s a good post about the strip there that is worth reading but I’d advise you to track down The Dead Man and read that before you do (it’s a bona-fide classic!)

Pádraig: We seem to have a theme in common here! Here’s a page of artwork from a story called Brainworms, which was written by Matthias Schultheiss and drawn by Bryan Talbot, and only ever appeared once, to the very best of my knowledge, in Revolver Presents: Xpresso in 1991. Bryan scanned it for me from the original (thanks, Bryan!), but says:

“It’s a bit badly cropped as it was so large it wouldn’t fit on the A3 scanner and I don’t have time to arse around scanning it in pieces and putting it together in Photoshop right now but I think it’ll be ok for the FP site. It’s quite old, so needed some cleaning up, especially the lettering, which was really grubby and on a separate acetate sheet.”

As to why I chose this one: I remember reading this story, what, twenty years ago, but the imagery has always stuck with me. I’m not even going to attempt to explain why, as I think it speaks for itself. It hasn’t been in print since then as far as I know, which is a real shame.

Wim: When our dearest editor asked me to come up with my favourite comic horror scene (as in, horror scene from comics, not ha-ha-horror), I immediately thought of Charles Burns.  Then I thought, Clive Barker (In The Hills The Cities from Tapping The Vein, or Like Flies to Wanton Boys from Hellraiser – they still give me the creeps).  But in both cases, the horror was balanced out by a more rational, distancing stance – after all, I wasn’t a kid anymore.

No, for real horror, we have to go back to the late 1970′s, when my mom gave me a comic that she had read : Johnny and Anny by Flemish creator Renaat Demoen.  It’s a fairly straightforward story about two orphans who go after a gang of sheep thieves (I still wonder how it ends : my copy lacked the last two pages).   On their search, they end up in a series of caves, where they find traces of blood.  Maybe it was Demoen’s rather sketchy style, which rendered even the most serene face almost zombie-like), or maybe it was my still quite impressionable younger self, but that scene almost made me write off the book forever.

If you want to read the whole book (that is, without the aforementioned two pages), head over to my blog.

Joe: As I said in the introduction, I’ve been a huge horror fan since I was a boy – books, films, comics, from the chilling, creepy ghost story to the body horror of Cronenberg, from EC Comics to The Walking Dead. And yet despite that when trying to think on a scene I found truly horrific, I found myself looking outside of the actual horror genre. Perhaps I’ve read and viewed too much, but much as I enjoy them, few of them scare me, much less horrify me – the thing about us horror hounds is, you have to remember that even the most OTT scenes are often funny to us (I laughed my way through the Exorcist). And yes, I am aware that shows up my sick sense of humour, but that’s not a bad defence mechanism.

So instead I thought less of genre and more just of scenes that had stuck in my memory over the years, scenes of particular horror but from outside the horror genre itself, and one which leapt to my mind was from Frank Miller’s Sin City: the Hard Goodbye. While the Sin City series is about as hardboiled crime genre as you can get, it too lifts from horror in some spots, and the one which has stuck in my mind since I first read it in the early 90s is the scene where giant bruiser Marv comes to in a cell on The Farm, waking from a beating to find his curvaceous parole officer Lucille huddled naked in the corner. There’s a serial killer called Kevin, a silent, shadowy, slight figure, but so preternaturally fast he even took down the almost unstoppable Marv. But Kevin is more than just a killer, as Marv is about to find out…

Looking up he finds the heads of murdered women arranged on plaques like hunting trophies – because to Kevin that is precisely what they are. And the fact that he mounts them in the cell where his next victims wait is part of the growing sense of horror – not just that he is planning to kill them, but that he wants to instil more terror in those victims by letting them see what has happened to others first, to let it build. Lucille is wide-eyed, in shock, but seemingly calm, as she tells Marv that he doesn’t just kill them and keep the heads – he eats them. Kevin is a cannibal, cutting up his female victims, cooking then consuming them, feeding the leftovers to his pet wolf.

But even this isn’t the most horrific element of the scene – as Lucille calmly explains this to Marv she hold up her arm. It ends in a bandaged stump where her left hand should be. He cut it off, she tells Marv. He cut it off and ate it – right in front of her eyes. He made her watch as he dined on her severed hand. The fragile calm suddenly breaks and Lucille screams at the horror of what Kevin has subjected her to, the scream echoing around the cell and out the barred grille, where, unseen by her and Marv, Kevin stands stock still, enjoying the screams, a small smile on his face. It isn’t enough to kill and eat his victims, the terror, the horror is what he wants to create and what his twisted soul feeds on.

I’ve seen much gorier and more contrived scenes of mutilation in horror films and comics over the years, but it is the cold, calculated, deliberate deployment of brutal, sadistic acts to create fear and horror by the protagonist that has lodged this scene in my head for so many years.