Graphic Content: Stray Dogs by Tony Fleecs and Trish Fortner

 Horror is not just a category; it’s also a spectrum, moving from silly to serious, haunting to gritty.

There are so many subgenres in horror that anyone who likes a good scare is sure to find something to like. Horror also isn’t afraid to go beyond its comfort zone to tell a good story, borrowing from different genres to create something both creepy and original. Praise should go to any work that’s brave enough to incorporate Don Bluth-style animation and anthropomorphic animals. This is the formula for the graphic novel Stray Dogs, and somehow it works.

The story is told mainly through the adorable eyes of Sophie, a small dog who is dealing with a lot of new things, a new owner and several other new dogs that she doesn’t recognize. Sophie is also having trouble remembering her past owner, but as the story progresses, she becomes convinced that something terrible has happened to her previous owner, known as “her Lady,” and she is convinced that the man who has taken her into his home has done something to her. All dogs might go to heaven, but Sophie will do whatever it takes to avoid that fate, especially since the man who now has her may have done terrible things.

One of the big appeals of this book is its seemingly incongruous elements that somehow come together. Tony Fleecs’s story, told through the dogs the man has collected, not only generates actual suspense and stakes with the standard he’s-coming-back-early approach, it also takes advantage of a fallacy of dog memory, which is explained in the book’s prologue. Dogs are more focused on the now, meaning that Sophie doesn’t remember her Lady clearly, and even Sophie’s new four-legged roommates tell her to forget about who she was with. The reader will practically beg Sophie to remember even as she and her new friends try to escape. The story is solid, but Trish Forstner’s artwork makes this work stand out, making it look like a Disney film with a villain very much like Hannibal Lecter. Story and art don’t take away from one another; rather, they combine to create a tale tailor-made for fans of adult animation and true crime. I know that I’m a fan of both as well as of odd combinations.

Graphic Content: Home Sick Pilots, Vol. 1: Teenage Haunts by Dan Watters and Caspar Wijngaard

 

Some might be aware that while I do love horror, I also love the superhero genre. I have written about superhero horror, but there are other books out there that show how seamlessly these two genres can combine to create something truly unique. There are a lot of examples of this blending of superheroes and the supernatural in the graphic novel/comic book format. One such example is Home Sick Pilots, Vol. 1: Teenage Haunts by author Dan Watters and illustrator Caspar Winjgaard, a book that has ghosts that turn its teenage characters into something akin to superheroes.

The book takes place in 1994 and features the band, the Home Sick Pilots, a band that is searching for acceptance in the LA rock scene as well as a few paying gigs. Looking for a truly unique place to play, they stumble upon an old house that turns out to not only be haunted but hungry. Bandmember Ami disappears within the house, but she ends up being recruited by the spirits within to recover other haunted items that hold mysterious powers.

Fans of young adult literature will find a lot to love in the interaction of the kids that make up the Home Sick Pilots, especially in the full-page minimalist trips into Ami’s thoughts as she tries to navigate her new state of being. The book isn’t scary, per se, despite having some very gory moments where the house attacks flesh and blood humans. The story instead focuses on the relationships among these kids, from rival band the Nuclear Bastards to a shady government agency that is trying to collect its own ghosts. The book is a great teen read, but there are great superhero moments where the possessed items within the house transform the user into something roaring straight out of an anime, and that’s not even mentioning the walking house. People might be disappointed if they were looking for a straight-up haunted house horror, but those who like manga, evil government agencies, and the Marvel universe should fly along with Home Sick Pilots.

Graphic Content: Mirka Andolfo's Mercy: The Fair Lady, The Frost, and the Fiend

 

There are some stories where the graphic novel is a perfect medium. Sometimes words pale in conveying the gut-churning cosmic horrors and mutated bodies that permeate Mirka Andolfo’s Mercy: The Fair Lady, the Frost, and the Fiend. However, this work is more than just a hearkening back to when EC Comics could show blood and gore with impunity. Mercy also borrows from many different genres and explores a lot of different themes.

The story itself takes place in Washington State in the late nineteenth-century. The town of Woodsburgh is still reeling from a mining accident that claimed many of its citizens, including the mine’s owner. In comes Lady Hellaine, a mysterious and beautiful stranger who, along with her faithful butler Goodwill, have come with promises to help the community while bringing with them an aura of mystery. However, Lady Swanson, the widow of the mine’s owner and a shrewd business owner, does not trust Lady Hellaine, mainly because Lady Swanson knows more about the otherworldly entities that forced the mine’s closure. Add to this plot a serial killer/monster called the Woodsburgh Devil, and the darkness seething in the mine as well as in the hearts of Woodsburgh’s citizens threatens to unleash something terrible.

This graphic novel is for readers that like their genres mashed up until they are their own unique genre. This story contains everything from historical fiction to cosmic horrors to romance to familial relationships. The undercurrent running through this tale, though, is identity. There are monsters here that wear human faces and seem separate from these identities, but the story shows that identity is not always cut and dry. Yes, these are alien monsters, but in possessing the memories and experiences of those whose skin they wear, do these monsters become capable of becoming human, with all the messy and glorious emotional attachments involved? In other words, how long before a perfect disguise becomes the real thing? Andolfo’s work as artist shows no shyness in depicting these unique monsters, especially delving into body horror as they mutate their human shells. She also uses the story to grapple with heady issues that go beyond mere blood and gore. Yes, it’s an adult comic, but not simply because it depicts sex and violence but because it tackles, if not entirely penetrates, some thorny philosophical issues.

Have You Read This? Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill, Leomacs, and Dave Stewart

 Looking once more at the offerings by Hill House Comics, it's high time I got to Joe Hill's main contribution to these titles, largely because it was the one that peaked my interest in Joe Hill's return to the graphic novel format. The cover of Basketful of Heads features a figure wearing a yellow rain slicker, face obscured in shadow. One arm holds a wicker basket with an America flag draped over it (one can assume it is the aforementioned basketful of heads). The other hand holds an archaic looking battleaxe (one can assumed it was used to sever the heads residing in the basket). Just by looking at the cover, you know what the story is about and what the major appeal of the book is. 

There is a story to the basketful of heads. It takes place on the island of Brody Island (if you watched Jaws, you'll either love the constant references to the movie or roll your eyes at them). It also features two young lovers June and Liam, who are trying to decide what to do with the rest of their lives as summer winds down on the island and all the tourists leave for the summer. She and Liam are then tangled up in a plot involving murder, corruption, and escaped convicts. Liam is captured and June, in fighting off a man in a prison jumpsuit, discovers an axe that has a strange enchantment: whenever you cut off someone's head with it, the head remains alive. June tries to track down Liam using the enchanted axe and her collection of severed heads that reveal more and more of the story. 

Yes, there is a mystery here, but it's not one that leaves a great many jaw-on-the-floor surprise twists. The only real mystery is how someone in the scene is going to lose their head and be added to the basket. However, the story isn't really the point. Joe Hill did the right thing calling this story Basketful of Heads because the title is basically the point. Sure, Hill shows his flair for dialogue and interesting characters that helped fuel the success of his seminal work Locke & Key, but this story is all about the hijinks one can get up to with a severed head. There's no Agatha Christie level of mystery here, or even a Flannery O'Connor deep dive into the human soul. This book is for fans of movies like Re-Animator and Evil
Dead that explores some really fun body horror humor. Even the art by Leomacs and Stewart harkens back to DC's Vertigo titles, which showed many adult situations in ink and paint. This book has a particular audience, but Joe Hill seems to know exactly what that audience wants. 

Fearsome Five: Top Five Books to Recommend to Fans of the Joker Movie

With so much great horror to read, I haven’t had the time to actually talk about the new Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and depicting yet another origin of the Clown Prince of Crime. Purists may quibble about a superhero movie being discussed here, but if there’s any villain who embodies the horror aesthetic, it’s the Joker. Looking at the movie, I can see where they get the comparisons to Taxi Driver. The Man-Who-Would-Be Joker Arthur Fleck does seem like a modern-day Travis Bickle, Gotham is portrayed as an urban pressure cooker as real as New York, and the one percenters in charge become the figureheads of everyone’s misery. Comparisons aside, Joker is a fascinating view of one man’s descent into insanity exacerbated by the circumstances of his existence.  When everything that Arthur has believed in is revealed to be flawed or outright lies, he begins to believe that nothing matters, that existence is a joke, and that is when the Joker that has been fascinating and terrifying audiences is born.

But Joker has been around nearly as long as his nemesis, and like Batman, Joker has gone through some evolutions and depictions which have evolved him into a truly scary villain that pushes Batman to his limits. Joker will be a story that, while not canon, will sculpt the mental image people have of Joker, just as these five graphic novels have shaped the dynamic between Batman and the Joker.

5) Batman: Under the Red Hood. While the story focuses on Batman and Jason Todd, the one Robin who was killed by the Joker and was later resurrected (Comics!), it does offer some explanation as to why Batman, who already takes the law into his own gloved hands, hasn’t simply snapped the clown’s neck or done something to truly end his horrific cycle of escape, terrorize, and get recaptured. It’s when Jason Todd, who has taken up the masked identity of the Red Hood (a historic name for fans of the comics), says that Batman must kill him or the Joker, a gun to the madman’s head. Todd explains that if their positions were reversed, he would hunt down the clown and kill him, something Batman refuses to do. He even tries to rationalize it by saying that it’s not Scarecrow, or Two-Face, someone who, according to Todd, had filled graveyards. Batman, his voice full of pathos, confesses that he thinks about killing the Joker every day and in many brutal ways, but he ultimately doesn’t because he knows that going down that path, where murder is seen as a solution, means never coming back. Because that could mean becoming . . .

4) The Batman Who Laughs. This is a Batman from a dark universe, one that is identical to our Batman except he finally makes the choice and kills the Joker. The Joker is, of course, prepared (one could argue he has always been prepared), allowing Batman to be infected with a toxin that slowly turns the Dark Knight into an amalgamation of Batman and his greatest enemy, a whipsmart tactician with no moral compunctions about killing everyone who can impede his goals, which typically involve the destruction of everything. This is also not hyperbole. This guy has taken out entire universes. Yes, universes.

 It is in this collection that the Batman Who Laughs tries to not just destroy the Batman but make sure he suffers the same fate. Batman, Joker toxin changing him, must marshal his forces and use his wits and deteriorating self-control to basically defeat himself. We talk about the Batman Who Laughs killing off entire universes, but he also stems from a dark universe, once created out of others’ nightmares. This villain and the circumstances that made him, that made Batman into the villain is what Batman probably fears the most.

3) Batman: Death of the Family. Fans may have been aware of Batman and Jokers’ battles in comics for years, but this collection acknowledges that the Joker in particular is aware of that dynamic. In fact, it is his whole purpose for the heinous acts he commits on Gotham and its citizens (bringing up a salient point about how much crime Batman causes versus how much he stops, but I digress). The Joker has returned, with a renewed mission, depicted by wearing his recently removed face as a mask. He strikes out not at Batman directly, or threatens Gotham overtly. Rather, Joker turns his attention to the various Robins and other sidekicks Batman has accumulated over the years, his family. They are indeed more to Batman than cannon fodder. They are the people he trusts the most, but they are also his support system. The Joker, however, sees the Family differently. He sees the Family as holding Batman back, so he sets out to eliminate them, ultimately forcing Batman to encounter another fear that probably motivates him, his actions being ultimately futile in preventing their deaths.

What this comic also exposes is how Joker genuinely believes (as much as the Joker can believe in anything ) that he is helping Batman become better by getting rid of what he sees as dead weight. In the Joker’s eyes, it has always been he and Batman, locked in eternal conflict until one or both are dead. It is the Joker’s true purpose for being, these tangles with the Dark Knight. Everything else, in his mind, is a distraction. The Joker’s relationship with Harley Quinn is a textbook abusive relationship that the Joker never reciprocates. His true love, always was and always will be, is Batman, who gives his twisted existence meaning.

2) Batman: Damned. In this obvious sharp right turn into horror, Batman must find help to solve a mystery: who killed the Joker? To help solve this mystery, he gets help from dashing supernatural rogue archetype John Constantine, who serves as both foil and tour guide, taking the Dark Knight through a Dante’s Inferno-esque head trip that has the Batman rediscover Bruce Wayne, the man, and Batman, the symbol. His understanding of both could be shattered as clues begin to point to himself as the lead suspect perhaps finally breaking his no-killing rule.

While this is a non-canon story, taking place in a much darker DC Universe, it does reveal the dark psychology underpinning Batman and Joker’s relationship. Batman has strictly adhered to his no killing rule, no matter the emotional and physical costs to him and members of his family. And yet the Joker is always testing that boundary, always trying to push Batman to break that rule, even if it means the death of the Joker. This comic ultimately explores the Batman possibly being pushed over the edge, but also the Joker finally succeeding in what he wanted all along: dragging Batman into the muck with him.

1) Batman: The Killing Joke. The one cited by many as the ultimate Batman/Joker story. If you ever watch the DC Animated movie, just skip that completely unnecessary Batgirl storyline and get to the main event. It’s one of many Joker origin stories (this one establishing that Joker remembers his past differently from day to day with him referring to his past as “multiple choice”), and like the Joker movie, it shows a man pushed to his limits until he snaps, leading to the famous remark that all it takes to become the Joker is “one bad day.” And what a decidedly bad day it is.

The Joker movie has lent itself to controversy with some saying it’s a manifesto for how to unravel society, even providing a rationale in that society is controlled by those in the upper echelon of wealth. Some have referred to Phoenix’s acting as he delves deep into the “bad day,” actually a series of ugly truths that, once peeled away, reveal some disturbing aspects of Arthur’s life. But this movie does owe its existence to The Killing Joke, and this work has influenced the works on this list and countless others. It is one of the first works that predicts that the ultimate end of this conflict is the death of one or both. While Batman will do anything he can to avoid it, Joker will happily accept their mutual destruction.

Screen to Scream: Hellboy and . . . More Hellboy

Watching the recent Hellboy movie, I felt a little bit underwhelmed (luckily, David Harbour has that Stranger Things gig), or maybe I should say overwhelmed. Like many comic movies, the plot is stuffed full with reference after reference to Hellboy stories, which is not necessarily a good thing since Hellboy’s mythos is jam-packed with creatures from literally all of folklore and years of published material. The working man character of Hellboy, which Harbour portrayed well enough, makes him popular with readers, but his rich backstory cannot and should not be shoehorned into a just under two-hour movie.  

That said, I am more than willing to introduce people to this character’s history.  Screen to Scream is meant to be a gateway from horror film to horror literature.  Hellboy has had his adventures on the big and small screen but the Mike Mignola creation’s exploits had already been depicted in many a graphic novel and collection. Here are some of my favorite examples pulled from Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1.

1) “House of the Living Dead” is an adventure that takes place during Hellboy’s disappearance in Mexico. One of the things that makes sure there are a wealth of Hellboy tales is his versatility. He’s a demon with a large stone hand, a herald of the Apocalypse who instead protects humanity. Hellboy’s backstory is so outlandish, while somehow grounded  in his working-class tough guy attitude, that he can be put in literally any kind of horror/fantasy story, and this story has a little bit of everything, from reanimated flesh golems a.k.a. Frankenstein’s monsters to werewolves to ghosts, and of course, Mexican lucha libre wrestling. This may seem like a kitchen sink kind of horror story, but in Hellboy’s universe it’s both a tragic tale and a showcase of what Hellboy and his large Right Hand of Doom does best.

2) “The Penangallan” showcases another appeal of Hellboy stories: how the authors of these tales, particularly Mignola, draw from all sorts of different folklore from around the world. Consider the titular monster that Hellboy must vanquish. The penangallan is a Malaysian vampire who, when the sun goes down, detaches its head from its body, and that head, dripping blood vessels and all, goes out to hunt for victims. A short but satisfying story, it shows how Hellboy deals with the unusual on a daily basis but handles it with the same simple pragmatism of a plumber dealing with a stubborn leak.

For fans of the Saturday Matinee creature feature, The Double Feature of Evil offers up two Hellboy stories that both reflect the hero’s charm that got him into three movies. Delving deep into his pulp roots, “Sullivan’s Reward” (3) is an interesting take on the possessed house trope that has Hellboy fighting a house. In this story, Hellboy receives punishment and much as he gives it. In the course of his fights, he’ll get knocked down, stabbed, what have you, but he gets back up, no matter how battered and bruised, to continue the fight. (4) “The House of Sebek,” on the other hand, showcases the sense of ironic humor that gives these brief interludes their staying power. Like “Pancakes,” also in this collection, though brief, these tales tell a complete story that may elicit a chuckle if one is not careful.  

5) “The Crooked Man” is one of my favorite Hellboy stories because it literally hits close to home. Hellboy’s job as a paranormal investigator has his traveling around the world, taking on deceased Nordic kings and their spirit wolves as well as the infamous Mexican bogeyman the Coffin Man, but for this story, he travels to the wooded hills of Appalachia to battle with the Crooked Man, an antagonist close to the literary Devil that beleaguered Young Goodman Brown and Daniel Webster, and Hellboy must also deal with some backwoods witchcraft. The Crooked Man is a standard Faustian devil trope, but in many ways is just as terrifying as a demon that lets its head fly around at night to feed. Like many good devils in search of souls, it offers promises of power and desire, and the cost of the soul seems so little until it’s actually lost, proving once and for all that Hellboy is more than a mascot or figure that launched a thousand awesome cosplays. Hellboy’s endearing personality, unending fortitude, and even his unique humanity allows him to fight everything that goes bump in the night.  

Have You Read This? The Ice Cream Man series

Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, beautifully illustrates the difference between genre and medium using a pitcher. The medium, like the pitcher, merely contains the ideas put into it. He uses this also to illustrate how comics and graphic novels aren’t just for children, or simply “less” than books without pictures. Using panels of pictures to tell a story, McCloud argues, isn’t just for kids. Rather, it depends on the content, of the sophistication of the ideas explored through those panels. Some horror aficionados may say that graphics in horror strip away the unknown, a definite appeal to horror, according to Lovecraft, thus denying the reader the opportunity to imagine the monster rendered there on the page, but there are comics and graphic novels that incorporate the medium in new and exciting ways to grab the audience by the throat and keep them terrified. An example of this is the Ice Cream Man series, by W. Maxwell Price, with art by talents like Martin Morazzo, and Chris Halloran, is one such example.

This series isn’t about one story; rather, it’s a Twilight-Zone like journey through multiple tales of weirdness. All these tales are linked through the titular Ice Cream Man, who changes from a Rod Serling or Cryptkeeper kind of character that introduces these tales to actually inflicting misery on these poor souls. The later volumes give readers a glimpse into his bizarre and otherworldly backstory, but the real joy of this series is the straight-up originality and sheer variety of the stories and how they are told. Here are some of the wilder examples:

1. A one-hit wonder who finds his purpose when he helps a group of song titles liberate their domain (You read that right, song titles).
2.   A man somehow lives three different timelines, finding three times the tragedy, madness, and burdening knowledge of the human experience. 
3. Dog brain surgeons. Not surgeons who operate on dogs, but dogs who are little brain surgeons. They wear scrubs and everything.  
4. A man trapped in a neverending lineup of demented reality television. 
5.  A space adventure at the end of humanity’s existence.

There are also some more down-to-earth, traditional horror dealing with subjects like drug addiction and a child’s first encounter with death, but they still greatly utilize images to tell their story and tug on the readers’ heartstrings. Like any good salesman of frozen treats, the Ice Cream Man has all sorts of flavors, whether you’re into vanilla hauntings or prefer a butter pecan existential dread.