Top 10 (and more) Comics for Halloween

I love Halloween. Not as much as the people who build animatronic skeletons for their front lawns, or my friend Matt, who probably had his daughter just so he could keep trick-or-treating well into adulthood (just kidding, Matt), but I do love it. I also love horror movies and, of course, horror comics. Now, some people claim that comics can never be truly scary, and it's true that you can't apply the same rules to comics that you do to movies, i.e. jump scares are pretty much out. On the other hand, some of the most disturbing, creepy, growing-sense-of-dread entertainment I've experienced came from between the blood-soaked pages of our favorite medium. After the break I'll tell you briefly about some of my favorites. Share some of your own in the comments!

10) Hellboy/BPRD - Only about half of any given Hellboy story is spooky. Eventually, Hellboy himself shows up, starts insulting the tentacled monstrosity that just sprouted out of a 100 year old man, and gets down to punching it into submission. But BEFORE that happens, when Mignola and his collaborators are mixing history, folk tales and dark magic into a heady, creepy brew, these are often some supremely scary comics. Try "The Wolves of Saint August", "The Crooked Man", and "Box Full of Evil" for some good examples.

9) Lords of Misrule - Dan Abnett (along with frequent writing partner Andy Lanning) is a household name for many current Marvel fans for work on series like Guardians of the Galaxy but his resume is actually wide and varied, including a lot of writing for Warhammer 40K and this gem of a series, a dark fairy tale with terrific black and white art by Peter Snejeberg and Gary Erskine.

8) Sandman #6 - Throughout its 60+ issue run, Sandman explored several different tones and styles, from melancholy to grandiose, from tragic to darkly humorous. Every once in a while things got a little nasty; who could forget the crows straining to break free from George's ribcage in "A Game of You" or the "cereal" convention in "A Doll's House"? No issue ventured as far into sheer, skin-crawling horror, however, as Gaiman and Dringenberg's tale of power without a conscience in "24 Hours."

7) Strange Embrace - Recently reprinted, this is one of the most sophisticated, legitimately harrowing tales of psychological horror and obsession ever committed to paper. I guarantee that memories of Alex and his strange and horrific past will linger long after you turn the last page. It's a real shame that David Hine went on to do perfectly decent Marvel work after this, but nothing approaching the impact and mastery of this story.

6) "When I Grow Up" - The last story in the last issue of Death Rattle #18, by Gerard Jones (whatever happened to him?) and Doug Potter, casts a spell on me unmatched elsewhere in comics, and each time I read it its power is undiminished. Several young children play a simple game of make believe, a game of "what am I going to be when I grow up," but instead of the typically blurry-edged fantasies of astronauts and firefighters, we watch as these children, physically unchanged, begin to enact the dramas, tragedies and regrets of their adult years. It's a powerful statement on the uncertainty of our futures and the wrong turns people can take, even those with the most innocent and openhearted intentions.

5) Taboo - Edited by Steve Bissette, Taboo is a seminal horror anthology. Besides being the first place parts of From Hell were published, it contained hundreds of pages of the most darkly disturbing writing and art from cartoonists all over the world. I discovered people like Matt Howarth and John Totleben (who drew the cover pictured here) in Taboo, as well as one of my favorite writers in comics today: Phil Hester. You'd barely recognize this Phil Hester, though. The stories that appear here, and in another great anthology called Negative Burn, are almost unmatched in their stark, visceral power. The art is jagged, primal, almost like cave paintings, and the writing has a similar ability to bore deep down into the blacker recesses of what it means to be a human animal.

4) Tapping the Vein - This one seems a bit like cheating; after all, these are adaptations of Clive Barker's short stories, not stories originally written for comics. But they're great, faithful adaptations of some of the best horror stories of the 20th century, so as far as I'm concerned, no list of scary comics is complete without them. Some of Barker's longer stories were also adapted into comics and those are just as good (Dread is one of the best and most frightening.)

3 Tainted - Raise your hand if you've even heard of this. You, way in the back: nice! Criminally underrated, Tainted was part of the short lived Vertigo sub-line of one shot comics that also included Peter Milligan's great Face and The Eaters. I recommend them all. But Tainted, a journey inside the paranoid, twisted mind of a very sick man is the one that stuck with me the longest. I haven't read this book in over a decade, but I can summon up the last page in my mind's eye even now...and the feeling of "oh, oh no" dread that went along with it. Written by Jamie Delano, the original writer of Hellblazer with art by Al Davison. I'm sure it's cheap if you can find it. Please do.

2) Fall of Cthulhu #1-14 - Lovecraftian stories done right are among the scariest stories on Earth; this is Lovecraft done right. After #14 the series got a bit too large scale for my tastes, and the monsters came too fully into the sunlight. But before that? Pitch perfect horror, with a truly nightmare-inducing moment about every half dozen pages. Hexed, a spin-off series, is also good stuff. Both are written by Michael Alan Nelson, who you might recognize as the writer of the 28 Days Later comic series, another great horror/action read.

1) Mermaid - There are a lot of oft-referenced horror manga: Domu. Uzumaki (look out for spirals!) The work of Junji Ito. A lot of it's great. For my money, though, nothing beats an underrated work by a manga artist better known for romantic comedies like Ranma 1/2: the Mermaid saga. If you eat the flesh of a mermaid, you might gain immortality...or you might be transformed into a hideous, twisted creature, mindless and doomed. Many are willing to take the risk, and many pay the price. In Rumiko Takahashi's atmospheric horror masterpiece, it's not always clear who suffers the worse fate. Creepy kids are creepy, and no one does them better than Takahashi.

So there's my list. I hope you'll share some of your own favorites, and maybe try a book or two from my list. A quick honorable mention list just cause I don't know when to shut up (and I do love horror comics!):

The Upturned Stone - Not truly scary, but a fantastic painted Halloween tale for all (most) ages.
Scary Godmother - Not the least bit scary, but Jill Thompson rocks, and so does this series.
Dead Space - Unusually successful video game based comic and one of the most genuinely creepy Ben Templesmith comics out there.
Shade, The Changing Man#1 - Not a horror comic, per se, but damn that first issue sticks with me. "I'm not mad. I get mad, but I'm not mad."
Mail - Ghost stories, Manga style. Good stuff that gets better as the three volumes progress.
Murder Can Be Fun - Non fiction stories. Nothing is scarier than real human beings.
Hard Looks - See above re: real human beings. These are fictional, but heavily based on real cases and situations of abuse and other depravities.
Hellblazer - C'mon, everybody knows what this is. There are some scary ones scattered throughout the run.
28 Days Later - Mentioned above, it ended too soon. Probably the best movie based comic I've ever read.