Comics and Graphic Novels: 13 Scariest Comics of All Time

Horror comics share one important thing with horror movies: Most of them don’t really scare you. Sure, they pile on vampires or psychos or zombies — or, in the case of the insanely overrated The Walking Dead, people sitting around talking for an entire issue while a zombie, if you’ve been very good this month, might make a two-panel appearance — but that doesn’t make ‘em terrifying. The ones that leave a mark mess with your head. They follow you to bed after the story’s done and make it hard to drift off to sleep.

The ones that leave a mark mess with your head.

So it’s no accident that many of the thirteen comics stories I’ve selected here have nothing to do with monsters. Some of them do, but the monsters seem almost incidental to the chilling core of the best horror: the scary idea.

Taking them in alphabetical order, then:

1. “All Hallows”

Twisted Tales #1, 1982

This one was recognized as a classic almost immediately upon publication. Some teenagers go house-to-house on Halloween night. They don’t want candy. They’re after something else. We follow them as they visit various people they’ve visited before, all of whom react to them with dread and horror. We don’t know why until the end. Bruce Jones’ realistic teen dialogue, Tim Conrad’s deceptively bland and naturalistic artwork, all lead to the sort of Old Testament twist (“Be sure your sins will find you out”) worthy of a Stephen King short story. The more you think about it, the less logical sense it makes (why wouldn’t the teens have been arrested after the first family?), but emotionally it makes perfect sense: the teens are frightening but also, in the end, completely understandable in their motive. They’re acting out of love for a friend. Which makes it all the more haunting.

2. “The Anatomy Lesson”

Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, 1984

To be sure, any number of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing stories could have made this list (and we’ve got another Moore story later on from a different comic). But this is the one that took everyone’s head off when they read it. Swamp Thing, who has spent years believing that he used to be scientist Alec Holland, is apparently killed and shipped off to be studied by mad scientist Jason Woodrue. Woodrue figures out that what he’s looking at on the slab is not Alec Holland, but a plant that has absorbed Holland’s consciousness. So there’s no magic or science that will turn Swamp Thing back into Holland. As the panels above spell out so chillingly: “He isn’t Alec Holland. He never will be Alec Holland. He never was Alec Holland.”

It was one hell of a way to reboot the series and the character.

So Swamp Thing wakes up, reads Woodrue’s notes, loses his shit, and goes after the only person who’s around to receive his wrath: Sunderland, the corrupt, elderly corporate bigwig who employed Woodrue and ordered Swamp Thing’s death in the first place. Stephen Bissette and John Totleben’s art is gorgeously nightmarish — even the panels are spiky and off-kilter, suggesting the disorientation of a monster who once thought he was a man. It was one hell of a way to reboot the series and the character.

3. “The Creatures in the Tunnels”

Bogeyman Comics #1, 1969

Rory Hayes, whose essential work is collected in Fantagraphics’ Where Demented Wented, wrote and drew stuff that looked like a child’s drawing dropped into a sewer, where it gathered layers of bizarre and unclassifiable refuse. When he drew horror stories, they looked like a particularly disturbed eight-year-old’s vision of the thing under the bed. There are several such stories in the Fantagraphics collection, but “Creatures” is pretty representative of Hayes’ predilection for pitting his typical teddy-bear character against horrific monsters that don’t look quite like anything you’ve ever seen. Hayes was only 20 when he published the issue containing this story; he was only 34 when he died of a drug overdose.

4. “Flies on the Ceiling”

Love & Rockets #29, 1989

In an interview published around the time this story came out, Jaime Hernandez talked a little about his Catholic upbringing: “I was afraid of the devil. I’m still afraid of the devil.” That comes through loud and clear in this piece about Isabel Ortiz Reubens, one of the many supporting characters in Hernandez’ epic saga. Here, Isabel goes to Mexico in an attempt to clear her head. She has a ton of guilt stored up. She’s an intellectual and can rationalize why she isn’t literally going to hell, but the problem is, she’s afraid of the devil. That’s probably a simplistic take on what goes on in this story, which is told largely wordlessly, but deep down it’s a war between rationalism and superstition raging in one woman’s head. Since this is a flashback story, we already knew what happened to Isabel afterward: we’d seen her obsessively swatting flies in earlier stories, because as the devil tells her here, “One day I may appear to you as flies on the ceiling.”

It’s a lot of other things, but on a basic level it’s a brilliant horror story.

Hernandez’ clean and masterful art, usually not given to depictions of the bizarre (generally that’s his brother Gilbert’s department), sets up a thick mood of dread. Then, when it’s time to glimpse some of the creepy things Isabel is seeing, Hernandez pulls out the stops with demons and ominous strangers and awful, monstrous births. He doesn’t overdo it, though: a panel here, a panel there, showing you exactly what you need to see and nothing more. It’s a lot of other things, but on a basic level it’s a brilliant horror story.

5. “Foul Play!”

The Haunt of Fear #19, 1953

This list couldn’t possibly respect itself without at least one story from EC Comics, the publisher that helped bring down the wrath of the U.S. government onto the comic-book industry in the ’50s. Stories like this one (and the next one on the list) explain why. This tale of revenge was so notorious, Stephen King devoted a few pages to it in Danse Macabre, his overview of horror. It was the first time many of us had heard of “Foul Play” and of the EC horror comics; two years after Danse Macabre was published, King and George Romero gave us Creepshow, a loving tribute to EC horror. What’s funny about “Foul Play” is that its reputation derives entirely from its final page, the type of eleventh-hour wallop that EC specialized in; the preceding six pages are fairly mild, lulling us into complacency (ah, a murder mystery), fattening us for the kill. Writer Al Feldstein devised the diabolical denouement, and Jack Davis drew it all for maximum gross-out effect — and this was almost sixty years ago!

6. “Horror We? How’s Bayou?”

The Haunt of Fear #17, 1953

And here’s the other EC classic (also name-checked by King’s Danse Macabre). I can do no better to describe this completely bugfuck tale than to quote from the Grand Comics Database’s synopsis: “A man in the Louisiana swamp diverts traffic from the road to his mansion in order to satisfy the cravings of his demented homicidal brother for victims to dismember” — and that’s just the set-up! It gets even more twisted! Al Feldstein did scripting duties on this, too — the man either had some serious issues or just had fun thinking up grotesque premises; he was the Tom Six of his day — but what really pushes “Horror We” over the edge is Graham Ingels’ peerlessly creepy and deranged artwork. He was nicknamed “Ghastly” Graham Ingels for a reason, folks (and horror giant Bernie Wrightson, represented twice later in this list, took more than a little inspiration from him). Just look at that image of the leering psychotic giant Everett in that second panel; it’s like a woodcut inscribed by lightning in hell. You want to know what stark raving evil looks like — look no further.

7. “In the Shadows of the City”

Haunt of Horror #1, 1974

Here’s one that needs to be viewed in the context of its time, to see how ahead of its time it was. Scripted by Steve Gerber (creator of Howard the Duck) and moodily illustrated by Vicente Alcazar, it’s a hallucinatory monologue narrated by an oddly-dressed guy (he wears a baseball cap and a Dracula cloak he probably found in a dumpster), who tells you how much he wants to kill you and how inevitable this is. In 1974, we hadn’t yet been glutted with the concept of the random psycho who just ends you for no good reason. There’d been a few movies (Psycho, of course, and also Last House on the Left; Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn’t hit theaters until a few months after this story hit newsstands), but nowhere near what we’d get in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Anyway, this story plays on a specifically urban terror: the weird guy you pass on the street might follow you home and do interesting things to your corpse for a few hours. Gerber’s penchant for weirdness verges on silly at times (dig the visit to the dentist, who has a vision of himself impaled on the psycho’s molar!), but for the most part this is a grim trudge through city paranoia, with a chilling final panel.

8. “Jenifer”

Creepy #63, 1974

Years later, writer Bruce Jones complained that comics fans, on meeting him, would bring up only one story of his: “Jenifer.” Jones subsequently penned dozens of other tales of terror, but this is the one that stuck to everyone’s ribs. (It was later adapted by Dario Argento as one of the Masters of Horror episodes.) The plot is simple and brilliantly cyclical: a man discovers a grotesquely deformed young woman in a forest. Taking pity on her — he’d interrupted another man trying to behead her — he takes her home. This turns out to be the bad idea to end all bad ideas. Jenifer (one “n,” for some reason) seems to have powers of mind control and also an unhealthy appetite. The family cat comes to a bad end, and that’s just a warm-up.

For $19.99, it’s the best Halloween present you can give yourself.

As beautifully and classically shaped as this tale is, it’s safe to say it wouldn’t have had nearly as much kick without master artist Bernie Wrightson’s astonishing portraits in ugliness. Wrightson, who’d just finished up his legendary ten-issue run on Swamp Thing (the first, 1970s incarnation, years before Alan Moore took over), arguably did his best and most demonically detailed work for the black-and-white Warren horror magazines, Creepy and Eerie. This story and #10 below, incidentally, just recently got reprinted in Dark Horse’s collection Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson. For $19.99, it’s the best Halloween present you can give yourself.

9. “Nemesis”

Miracleman #15, 1988

Wrapping up a story arc in which the superhero Miracleman ended up benevolently ruling the world, this notorious issue pits Miracleman against his arch-enemy, Johnny Bates (aka Kid Miracleman). They fight. But dear bleeding Christ, the collateral damage! Writer Alan Moore (yep, him again) must have sat down and asked himself: What would a completely psychotic villain with unimaginable powers do with himself for a few hours in London while waiting for the hero to show up and battle him? Answer: He systematically tears apart the city and everyone in it. Men, women, children, they all die horribly at his hands. Then Miracleman finally gets there, and even more people die when helplessly caught in the crossfire. Over a panel of Miracleman throwing a car at Bates, the hero narrates: “My apologists have claimed that the first car I hurled at Bates was empty, all those inside having previously escaped. I’m sorry, but that isn’t true.”

Each page looks like it took months around the clock to render.

If it is possible to find and nourish beauty in the obscenity of massacre, artist John Totleben did it with a vengeance. Each page looks like it took months around the clock to render. The apocalypse has never been delineated in more ruthless detail. Here, taking off from Moore’s concept, Totleben has visualized the unspeakable. And the horror comes from what usually gets blown off in superhero comics: the cost of war. This is what would happen, Moore says, if two superpowers really faced off. After this, Moore left superhero comics for years (then returned to them in an effort to make more light-hearted all-ages superhero fare). What could he possibly have done for an encore?

10. “Nightfall”

Eerie #60, 1974

Bernie Wrightson again, with a classic (scripted by Bill DuBay) that harps on a common childhood terror: There are monsters in your room! But your parents won’t believe you! Your grumpy dad keeps telling you to shut up and go to sleep, there’s no such thing as monsters, I’ll beat your ass if I have to come in here again tonight! But every time your parents shut your bedroom door behind them and leave you in the darkness, the monsters come back! And they want to take you away! The kid here is named Nemo, in an obvious nod to Winsor McCay’s vintage comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, so Wrightson gets to pay tribute to one of the masters while forging his own night terrors.

11. “Orem Ain’t Got No Head Cheese”

Creepy #85, 1977

Now here’s some high-octane nightmare fuel, again scripted by Bill DuBay with spectacularly repulsive art by Jose Ortiz. Cannibal cousins slaughter anyone foolish enough to poke around their remote shack. They select the best bits of the bodies for dinner, and toss the rest in a big “slime pit.” Then they have the misfortune to kill someone who has a brain tumor, and … Well, when you get down to it, this is sort of a cornpone Herschell Gordon Lewis rewrite of “Horror We? How’s Bayou?” But the concept is so casually repugnant, and the monster is so vomit-inducing, that the story leaves good taste writhing and bleeding in the mud and warrants inclusion here.

12. “Satan’s Child”

House of Mystery #256, 1978

On the face of it, this story (written by Jack Olick) is somewhat conventional. A backwoods lout marries a mousy woman so that she’ll wait on him hand and foot and bear him a son; he unwisely visits a voodoo woman to expedite the process. What sets this above other horror comics is the deeply strange and disturbing artwork by Arthur Suydam, who worked in underground and horror/fantasy comics for years before becoming a 52-year-old overnight success in 2005 with his splashy cover art for the popular Marvel Zombies series. I can remember some readers firing off heated letters to the editors of House of Mystery back then, demanding to know what kind of disgusting no-talent doodler had marred issue #256. Other readers found Suydam’s work fascinating in a squirmy-bug-under-a-rock sort of way. I’m in the latter camp.

13. “24 Hours”

Sandman #6, 1989

Remember #9 above? This is that in microcosm: Doctor Destiny, a madman who seeks to destroy Dream of the Endless, tries out his head games on a group of customers in an all-night diner. Writer Neil Gaiman, back in the early days when Sandman was still more of a horror comic than a fantasy comic, asks himself what a sadist with the power to control thoughts and feelings would do for 24 hours while waiting for the hero to show up (sound familiar?). So we watch as the diners maim each other, have sex with each other, confess awful sins to each other, kill each other. On the TV, we also see that the same thing is happening all over the world, this broadband insanity that threatens to swallow up humanity unless Dream can stop it. Artists Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III occasionally falter but sometimes come through with frightening images, like the one above of Doctor Destiny sneering “Because I can.” Brrr.