The Mammoth Book of Horror Comics

Book review
Edited by Peter Normanton
Robinson paperback
Release date Out now

Tales of terror from the past 60 years of comic book publishing…

Horror comics were the early 1950s equivalent of ‘video nasties’. These lurid but phenomenally popular tales of ghosts, zombies, cannibals and other nightmarish marvels eventually prompted such moral panic that a ‘Comics Code’ was introduced in 1955, effectively killing (or at least neutering) the genre until a resurgence of sorts in the 1970s.

This wonderful collection gathers together many strips from the genre’s golden age, including influential early examples like 1944’s ‘Famous Tales of Terror’ from Yellowjacket Comics. It then proceeds to chart the development of the genre through to the present day, with contemporary examples represented by such gory efforts as the Cal McDonald mysteries by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. The strips all share an obsession with the dark side, but vary considerably in terms of tone and artistic styles, ranging from the sinister and expressionistic to recent experiments with photo manipulation.

There is nothing here by the most celebrated horror publishers such as EC or Warren – as Peter Normanton says in his introduction, such publishers have already put out anthologies of their own (though you have to suspect that the cost of reprint rights played some part in their omission). But it matters little, as this anthology contains a well chosen cross-section of forgotten gems and cult classics, and the early examples now feel like an appealingly nostalgia-filled distillation of Cold War paranoia.

The comic strips are presented in chronological order, and Normanton (editor of horror comics zine From the Tomb) provides each decade with an informative overview, so that the book also acts as a general education to this diverse and wilfully unconventional genre. Matt McAllister