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Tag: horror

Ghost Writer

Cartoon by Graham Annabelle.

And just a reminder, Graham AKA Grickle has a new graphic novel for kids called Eerie Tales from the School of Screams coming out this summer.

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Free Library

Cartoon by Graham Annabelle.

Graham has a new graphic novel for kids called Eerie Tales from the School of Screams available in July.

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The Skull by Jon Klassen

Author and illustrator Jon Klassen recently announced that his new book The Skull will be available from Candlewick Press in July, 2023. A whopping 115 pages, and based on a folktale Klassen read in a library before an event in Alaska (a great story in itself!), it tells the tale of a girl who runs away from home and befriends a talking skull she finds alone in a house in the woods. It is as spooky and macabre as it sounds, and totally worth the wait!

Jon Klassen’s latest book with Mac Barnett, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, was published this month.

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Find Your Stories in the Dirt

cover design by Steven Seighman
cover design by Steven Seighman

I mentioned Andrew F. Sullivan’s piece on High-Rise last week, and I recently spoke to the author about his own novel WASTE, and about influence of David Lynch on his writing in a Q & A for Publishers Group Canada:

Initially, I think I was very resistant to Lynch. I think I thought a lot of it was just nonsense for the sake of nonsense. It was Blue Velvet that won me over, that showed me you could implicate and confront your audience, you could tell a sad, vicious truth and people would want to hear it/see it. Lynch opened up so many opportunities to leave the explanation out, to make the work immersive and unsettling while still dancing around the established conventions for storytelling. What he was doing seemed very singular, but also invested in the everyday, in waking up, going to work, putting in the hours. He created a world, especially in Twin Peaks, that began as just slightly askew, plausible even. He lured you into the nightmare and then told you it was real. And everyone questions the theories their friends have, there is no code to break. His work exposes the peculiarities of each audience member in their own response—their passions, fears and obsessions. How can they make this story make sense? What demons does it awaken?

Lynch is still doing that. He is always doing that.

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This is…Scarfolk

sasek-scarfolk

After illustrating other famous cities around the world,  Miroslav Šašek apparently decided to visit to Scarfolk, England…

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Countryside Terror!

countryside-terror

Tom Gauld.

(Not having seen The Guardian this past weekend, I can only assume that Tom’s cartoon is a reference to this).

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The Eeriness of the English Countryside

A-Field-in-England-009
A Field In England

Robert Macfarlane, whose new book Landmarks was published in the UK last month, has a fascinating essay in The Guardian on the writer M. R. James, and the eerie horror of the English countryside:

We do not seem able to leave MR James (1862–1936) behind. His stories, like the restless dead that haunt them, keep returning to us: re-adapted, reread, freshly frightening for each new era. One reason for this is his mastery of the eerie: that form of fear that is felt first as unease, then as dread, and which is incited by glimpses and tremors rather than outright attack. Horror specialises in confrontation and aggression; the eerie in intimation and aggregation. Its physical consequences tend to be gradual and compound: swarming in the stomach’s pit, the tell-tale prickle of the skin… James stays with us is his understanding of landscape – and especially the English landscape – as constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried sufferings and contested ownerships. Landscape, in James, is never a smooth surface or simple stage-set, there to offer picturesque consolations. Rather it is a realm that snags, bites and troubles. He repeatedly invokes the pastoral – that green dream of natural tranquillity and social order – only to traumatise it.

James’s influence, or his example, has rarely been more strongly with us than now. For there is presently apparent, across what might broadly be called landscape culture, a fascination with these Jamesian ideas of unsettlement and displacement. In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.

I think the eerie is also a theme that runs through English comics, although Macfarlane doesn’t mention it, and I’m hard pressed to think of specific examples. Gothic psychogeography is very much Alan Moore territory, and it feels like it should be in Warren Ellis’s wheelhouse too, but have either of them written anything explicitly about the horror of the English countryside?

(via Theo Inglis)

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Batman: Strange Days

Batman-Strange-Days
For me, and I suspect plenty of other people of a certain age, the noir-inspired Batman: The Animated Series, is still the most satisfying version of the character to come to screen. The series has long since ended but happily, Bruce Timm, co-creator of the series, has produced a new, wonderfully retro, animated short called Batman: Strange Days to celebrate the Dark Knight’s 75th anniversary:

In a recent interview with Comics Alliance, Timm talked about his work on the original series and the retro look of the new short:

I wanted to make the whole cartoon look as if it was like the cartoon itself was made in 1939, got stuck in a vault somewhere, and nobody has seen it until now. Not that I thought we were going to pull that kind of hoax, but that was the feel I wanted. I wanted it to be so authentically old school. I went back and looked at those early Bob Kane comics and even though they’re really super crude, there’s something really cool about the way Batman looks in those comics. He’s got the really long ears, they kind of stick out in an inverted “A” shape, or a “V” shape, on the top of his head because they kind of stick out on an angle; they’re really tall. He’s got tiny eyes, his trunks are long, his boots are long. He has short little gloves. I tried to incorporate as much of that in there as possible.

No surprise then that like the animated series, it reminds me a lot of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons from the early 1940s. The first episode of that series, “The Mad Scientist”, was released September 26th 1941 (before Superman could even fly!):

Personally, I like the episode 2, “The Mechanical Monsters, a lot:

And just as side note, when Batman first battled Hugo Strange’s giant monster men in Batman #1 (Spring 1940), he doesn’t mess about with tear gas — he actually takes them down with a machine gun. It would be the last time Batman killed anyone on purpose.
batman-strange-days-the-end

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Emily Carroll Through the Woods

I really like Emily Carroll‘s online horror comics, so I’m really pleased that a collection of her work is going to be published by Simon & Schuster next July. Through the Woods will include comics like His Face All Red as well as some new, but similarly dark and folkloric, short stories Carroll has been working on.

(via Robot 6)

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Out of Skin by Emily Carroll


Just in time for Halloween and clocks going back, Canadian artist Emily Carroll has posted a chilling new webcomic called Out of Skin. Although it can be read a standalone story,  Carroll says on her blog that she considers it “part of a trilogy in terms of setting & theme” with her earlier comics His Face All Red and Margot’s Room, both of which are well worth reading if you haven’t doesn’t already.

Happy Halloween!

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Horror Story by Grant Snider

Grant Snider’s new Halloween horror story will chill the hearts of writers everywhere: 

 

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Graphic Horrors

I missed this during Banned Books Week, but with Halloween and Bonfire Night around the corner, it still seems somewhat timely…

At Print magazine Michael Dooley looks back at the comic books featured in Fredric Wertham’s infamous 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth.

Part one deals with “subliminal nudity, women’s ‘headlights,’ and the fascism and homosexuality of DC superheroes.” Part two, as Dooley gleefully notes, delivers “pages of eye injuries, Nazi vampires and teenage dope fiends.”

Dooley makes it clear he wants to “bury Dr. Fredric Wertham,” so don’t expect a lot of context (if you want more to read more about it, pick up The Ten Cent Plague by David Hadju), but hell, it’s fun anyway.

‘An Uncensored Look at Banned Comics’, a full-length story on banned comics, will appear in Print‘s February 2014 issue.

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