Horror fiction is best as a short, sharp shock, getting right to the fucking point, often literally. The horror short story is one of my absolute favourite small slices of genre, after I was raised on the deeply unsettling vibes of Stephen King's short stories, and on classics like The Monkey's Paw.
The best horror comics obviously came out when I was nine years old - I was totally obsessed with Scream! and devoured endless reprints of the DC horror comics (they were also the only comics I ever saw my Mum read). I was too late to the EC ghost train, but inhaled all the endless variations that followed it.
I recently got a Treasury book of DC's Ghosts comic from the 70s, so I've been been lapping that stuff up again. The big book has terrifically huge art by greats like Aparo and De Zuniga, and there is still something charming about the clunkiness of the stories by the late great Leo Dorfman - the boy who people saw with an evil claw turns out to be *gasp* John Wilkes Booth!
I've also been trying some modern horror short stories with the Hello Darkness series by Boom Studios, and have been pleasently surprised by how nasty and fun they are. Some things really do not go out of style.
It did get grim for the short horror comic for a few years, at least in mainstream comics. Stories began getting too clever for their own good sometime in the irony-saturated 90s, and while Vertigo Comics took a good stab at it, those stories have not as aged as well as their 70s contemporaries. Too metatextual, too self important, too fucking obvious.
Hello Darkness generally succeeds the way these kinds of things always do - by producing stories from a bunch of veteran creators, mixed with some new, raw talent, keen to make their mark. Not every story hits the target - there is a lot of the obvious, with too many of them ending with a sudden grotesque monster lurking out from behind the story's main character - but some of them are properly charming, some are really fucking creepy, and some of them just look beautiful.
The most unsettling thing in Hello Darkness is Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan's The War, serialised across the first eight or so issues. It might the bleakest thing Ennis has ever done, as a bunch of ordinary douchebags are wiped out in a nuclear war. It's got no romance, no mutants, no hope, just bitter recriminations at all that was wasted, and a slow death from radiation poisoning. It's one of the few stories in Hello Darkness that doesn't have any kind of supernatural element, and is all the more horrific because of it.
It's hard to scare anybody with the words and pictures of a comic, but they can put unsettling ideas into your head, while showing you terrors that have never been seen before. It's an eternally eerie format, and it's good to see it being used so well.
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