ADVENTURES INTO SCARY STUFF

Here be more reactions to Curt Purcell's CAN COMICS BE SCARY post, where I see via the comments-thread that at least one poster, Martin Wisse, shares my impatience with the way the question was originally framed by Richard Cook. Wisse calls the original post:

A mess of baseless assertions and naive reasoning...

I'd just say "ditto" if Rush Limbaugh hadn't tainted the word. Of course mere agreement doesn't make for a good essay, so I'll move on to one of the offhand comments of CWRM, who says:

Aside from the formal challenges of communicating certain varieties of fright, there's the fact that most horror comics aren't really interested in communicating scares. Many of the titles out there (I'm thinking of '70s stuff like "Tomb of Dracula" and modern stuff like "Marvel Zombies") are really more adventure titles with some horror trappings. Then there's a strain of highly structured classic horror. The older anthology titles, like the EC family of titles, with their almost ritualistically repetitious stories and O. Henry "surprise" endings, seem to be less frightening than darkly, almost ironically humorous. Not to drag on (too late), there's also a strain of extreme comic horror that's less about fear and more about the shock of the extremely grisly. Not that any of these are illegitimate exercises in comic horror, but they aren't really meant to frighten the reader.

I agree that there are a lot of EC stories that are so self-conscious about their twist endings that they seem more like shaggy-dog stories than horror tales. But some, like my earlier example of "Foul Play," don't communicate that sort of humor to me. The ending of "Foul Play" is over-the-top and becomes ridiculous if you give it any sustained thought, but I don't think the story's almost ritualistic desecration of the human body (albeit the body of an inhuman villain) is humorous. If I'm correct that a receptive reader can "take in" a given sight depicted in comics-panels and convert it within the mind into something more horrible than what the eye sees, then I think that in "Foul Play" you have a fine recipe for what Lovecraft called "the thrill of unutterable ghastliness," and not just, as CWRM says in his next paragraph, "anxiety."

I've written a fair amount about some of the problems I've encountered in sussing out where the horror-genre stands with respect to my chosen Fryean mythoi, with certain strands verging closer to the adventure-mythos (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) while others, like the prose DRACULA, hew closer to the mythos of drama, which I view as a mythos of compromised power. So while I understand CWRM's tendency to see a Marvel book like TOMB OF DRACULA as an adventure title with horror trappings-- after all, the one thing one can always find in a 1970s Marvel book is a gratuitous fight-scene!-- I still think of TOMB OF DRACULA as hewing closer to the dramatic mythos than that of adventure. Possibly in future I'll look at a few representative TOD stories to make my case, just to satisfy my own classification "jones."