Two of you were down for last newsletter’s pair of giveaway books so we’re splitting them up like the world’s weirdest custody court — but how do we pick who gets what? Enter Gizmo, who is comically bad at catching Gizmosnacks, so to make it fair, we first randomize who gets assigned what book based on Gizmo’s action, then Gizmo takes his lopsided run at the snack. Oh, the drama!
Congrats to Shelley, Eric, and… eventually Gizmo — Everyone’s a winner!
Horror that doesn’t call itself Horror isn’t just for the Nightly News…
Horror is a durable genre and we’ve got no shortage at the store. I’d like to single out “The War” by Garth Ennis, serialized in the Hello Darkness anthology, as having a particularly horrific take on the “Young Couples Shack Up in the End of the World” trope by at least thus far avoiding the genre’s usual mix of fantasy and supernatural elements, viz. this interview with artist Becky Cloonan:
While the other stories in Hello, Darkness employs what I’ll call it “fictitious horror,” what we find in “The War” is very close to reality. Cloonan: Yeah. Uncomfortably close to reality. It’s terrifying.
Is that something that’s going to continue as it goes on or will it be a little bit more speculative? Cloonan: “The War” goes to a very, very, very dark place. It’s maybe the darkest comic I’ve ever worked on. It’s upsetting, it’s disturbing, it’s harrowing. And after I read the script, I was like, “Oh my God! First of all: how am I going to draw it and do this justice and bring the weight of these scripts to the drawn page?”
But sometimes, horror that calls itself horror is too on the nose for your mood.
Dan Clowes…
…has always been steeped in Lynchian horror and weirdness since a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (ask Uel if he’s willing to sell you his out-of-print copy from home, or listen to the soundtrack!), but you’d be hard-pressed to file him in the horror section. Ghost World, a book with a horror title if there ever was one, reduces LaVeyan Satanists to a pair of weirdos with grocery carts full of Lunchables.
Faces of Evil!
Still, his last book, Monica, is about as full-bore Rosemary’s Baby-level horror as you can get — but check out this New York Times review — you’ll see the adjectives “weird” and “Gothic” thrown about but nowhere does “horror” appear.
Last year’s Oppenheimer (and Barbie, too, for that matter) sneaked some existential horror into the mix, but when you’re talking about nuclear annihilation, I’m not sure if the edict that the unseen horror is the scariest — this scene from Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, even when filtered through the stylization of cel-based anime, is pretty tough to take.
Joe Corallo repped for this (along with several other recommendations) on the Tuesday Show, and what a fine rep it is. I hesitate to classify Beautiful Darkness as All-ages given that these Borrowers-sized woodland sprites are making a home off a decaying human corpse —
Not really spoilers since this is the cover of the book!
— definitely more Roald Dahl meets Brothers Grimm than R.L. Stine, but it’s for sure a proud-to-have-on-your-bookcase classic and a great gift-giving choice for the right impressionable kidult.
Weirdly, Jim Woodring’s…
…oeuvre, though explicitly rendered in a kid-friendly cartoon landscape free of the adult world of speech and overt politics, might be for a more mature audience than . You can argue it’s more psychedelic than horror, but I say what can be more horrific than a bad trip? Woodring will sometimes take you there. Check out the work of these Japanese animators doing their versions of Woodring’s stories:
If there’s a common theme to these horror-but-not-Horror books, it’s that their primary goal isn’t to scare you or gross you out, and this lack of intent paradoxically makes them both easier to swallow for those icked out by the Cryptkeepers of the comics landscape, but also more genuinely creepy at times than… Creepy Magazine.
Finally the Giveaway book — Batman: Night of the Monster Men
Having read it, I have to admit this is not the most well-written Bat story out there, but the art is great, and it does feature a Clayface/Batman team-up that teams up in a way I was not expecting.
If you’d like a chance to snag this (out-of-towners with store credit we can deduct shipping from are also welcome to try), hit reply with your recommendation for a non-Horror comic that is actually a horror comic.
A careful reading of the ending of A Small Killing by Alan Moore reveals some story elements typical of the horror genre.