Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #196 by Drew Barth

Damned If You Don’t

Although the spooky season will soon close, ghosts and demons flow through the pages of comics—even the ones that Fredric Wertham thought would jump out and murder children—a proudly ignominious tradition. Today, we have a new spookier series releasing in Damn Them All by Si Spurrier, Charlie Adlard, Sofie Dodgson, Shayne Hannah Cui, and Jim Campbell.

I enjoy a good Spurrier comic, whether that be Six-Gun Gorilla, Coda, or Godshaper, a new series from him and the artists he collaborates with is always a treat. Damn Them All is a deep-dive into the demonic: what it means to summon them, the costs of doing so, and the people who make it happen. The people who make it happen, namely Ellie Hawthorne and her uncle, the late Alfie Hawthorne, have the strongest occult connections and know that summoning a demon is something that can’t be done or taken lightly. But then it does happen lightly. At Alfie’s funeral a kid pulls a demon out to kill a rival gangster—no summoning magic, no spells, not sacrifices, nothing at all. For the most part, everything normal in the summoning world is no longer relevant. If you have a sigil and a grudge, you can summon something horrifying to mutilate your enemies. And that means something is very wrong.

Most interesting in this first issue of Damn Them All is how Adlard’s art plays with perspective and time. The first few pages gives us our background—Ellie and her uncle and the process by which magic can be done. We’re given the entire sequence through Ellie’s eyes and have these brilliant white spaces where narration, quite literally, fills in the gaps. These spaces break the page up in an interesting way where they’re just large enough to feel like borders, but not so large that they compete with the panels of art between them. They provide a rhythm, as if we’re in the middle of a montage, and gets us used to some of the more fun tricks the creative team plays throughout the issue. We have the rhythm of the montage, the white panels and thoughts, leading us always toward a splash page reveal or action of some kind. Like a conductor’s baton, the structure of the pages keeps the story beats in time.

Damn Them All is the kind of spooky comic I never know that I’m waiting for, then the book materializes and shocks me with how much further I wish to dive to find all of the demonic things clawing at the edge of the page. Damn Them All #1 showcases Spurrier, Adlard, Dodgson, Cui, and Campbell as masters of the craft of introductions—we see a little, but we want more.

Get excited. Get possessed.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #194 by Drew Barth

Creep Along

I hate the comics code. You hate the comics code. We all hate the comics code. Beside the general sanitization of comics in the 50s and Fredric Wertham clutching his pearls so hard his face turned purple, the code caused the cancellation of some of the most innovative comics of the century. Books like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear were wiped from the comics market as the Comics Code Authority came down like a guillotine on anything more gruesome than a bird eating a worm. But that’s where Warren Publishing’s Creepy stepped in to dodge around the CCA.

Originally published in 1964, Creepy was one of the books that would side-step the censorship of the comics code by changing its formatting. No longer a comic book, the comic magazine didn’t need to carry the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval. Because of this and its black-and-white print pages, it was allowed to return to the horror of EC Comics (with many of the EC creators along) and publish a wide variety of horror comics in that same Tales from the Crypt vein. While the original life of the magazine ended in the mid-80s (and its short-live relaunch also ending in 2016), the publication of its archives via Dark Horse has unlocked a trove of some of the best horror to grace the medium with names like Archie Goodwin, Joe Orlando, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, and Alex Toth conjuring up iconic creeps.

More than anything, a tome like the Creepy Archives helps to preserve some of the best parts of comics history—defiance in the face of McCarthyism and the moral panic against anything that may tempt the youth of America from, I don’t know, Perry Como? But it’s this kind of preservation that also gives us a look at the classic comic horror that prevailed for so long in the US. While Tales from the Crypt was the more iconic, magazines like Creepy and Eerie were carrying the torch and provided a pivotal place for horror comics to really develop a look and feel that would remain consistent and is still being emulated today in more contemporary horror anthologies—albeit with more gore than would have been allowed even outside of the CCA then. These archival works just show how much comic history is really out there and how much is largely ignored to make room for more cape stories.

Creepy, and Warren Publishing, really did show what horror anthologies could do in the era of the comics code. While they weren’t under threat from the code, they were still skirting by with their own brand of horror comics with iconic talent bolstering their pages to a near legendary status. It’s a marvel that we can still flip through Frazetta’s “Werewolf” before he switched away from sequential work or Archie Goodwin’s creepiest scripts as though we were picking them up for the first time in the 60s. It’s one of the reasons much of this archival work is so important. 

Get excited. Get Creepy. 

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.