Funnybook Roundup, Halloween Edition: "Braaaaaaaaaains...."

by Glen Weldon

Since the post-World War II heyday of EC Comics, horror's been a signature comic book genre.

Which is really odd, when you stop and think about it. For a couple of reasons.

Reason One: Comics by their very nature defy what is perhaps the most frequently cited horror tenet, namely: The scariest stuff is the stuff you don't see.

(In funnybooks, you see everything. That, in fact, is more or less the idea.)

Oh, sure, writers and artists can set a mood, using language, line, shading and color. They can even build tension, of a sort, in that millisecond before you turn the next page.

But (Reason Two) what they can't do is make effective use of tension-and-release, the two-stroke engine that drives horror narratives. If you've ever watched a movie through your fingers, you know what I'm talking about: The slow build of sick dread, the sudden shock, the screaming relief.

The funny thing about each of those tropes, see, is that they are largely functions of pacing.

And I'm going to let you in on a dirty secret about comics: Pacing? Doesn't exist.

After the jump: Why horror comics have to settle for unsettling; assorted zombie matters; and the Monster at the End of this Post.

Try as they might, comic book creators can't truly control the rate at which readers proceed through their tales. The reason: Peripheral vision.

The eye takes in the whole page at once, devouring everything from the placement of word balloons and sound effects to the arrangement of panels and the images therein. It's a fuzzy snapshot, yes, but it's enough to throw a spanner in the works.

If, for example, while turning a fresh page in the latest issue of Betty and Veronica, you happen to catch even a fleeting glimpse, down in the lower left corner, of Mr. Wetherbee disemboweling Archie with a pickaxe, you can't will yourself to un-glimpse it: As you proceed through the panels, that farm implement sticking out of Archie's sweater vest will hover at the edge of your consciousness like a pinhole leak in the narrative, deflating the tension.

Which is most likely why your average horror comic sets its sights considerably lower, at the reader's gag reflex. "If all else fails, go for the gross out," wrote Stephen King in his how-to horror treatise, Danse Macabre, and they do.

In this, as in everything, there are trends. Over the past few years, vampires in fetish gear have gradually ceded the comic-shop shelf space they once occupied to a plague of zombies.

Yep, there's a whole lot of books about zombies. Just trust me on this.

The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman's wrenching, character-driven account of an undead apocalypse, is the best of the lot by several orders of magnitude.

Like its numerous lessers, it traffics in gore by the gobbet and blood by the bucketful — but what makes reading The Walking Dead such a visceral experience has nothing to do with all its lovingly rendered viscera.

Kirkman's take is a resolutely intimate, humanistic one. He places us among a tiny group of survivors fighting desperately to stay alive, and never allows them — or us — room to breathe and reflect.

As events unfold, his characters get tested in ways that leave them irrevocably changed, their existence gradually reduced to a string of terrible, punishing choices.

Sound like fun?

Well it is, because at irregular intervals, Kirkman's narrative takes wrenching left turns that change everything. We go along for the ride, knowing that at any moment our favorite character could wind up dead, or undead.

Yet the dread that pervades the book is of an altogether chewier, more satisfying variety than the thin "Who's gonna get snuffed?" gruel of conventional horror.

It's existential dread, is what it is. Because as this small, scrappy group fights against the inhuman onslaught, they take actions that place their own humanity in jeopardy.

And we grow rapidly less certain what Kirkman is referring to in the series title: The drooling, flesh-eating corpses shambling across the countryside? Or are The Walking Dead these last, doomed humans who've seen too much and done too much, and must now struggle to remain emotionally alive?

Couple More Things, In Re: Zombies

They have their own high holy day, and you just missed it.

Also: Dressing up as the undead and lurching around downtown areas and centers of indoor commerce is, like, a whole thing.

The World's Most (Okay, Only) Truly Freakin' Terrifying Graphic Novel

Not kidding, here. This is the book that ruined thousands of carefree childhood idylls, including my own. This book taught the 4-year old me about fear. And meta-fiction. Mostly fear, though.

Click, if you dare.