It's the season for reading horror comics

Four off-season comics you should read this winter

Jan 04, 2024

Dear hopeful reader,

For me, spring and summer are seasons for celebrating life. But in winter, I like to plunge into the dark pits of our human experiences. Oddly it’s not fear I feel, but catharsis. Light is close by that darkness can’t enclose me.

It’s quite a paradox how a body holding sometimes supreme pain—especially in the piercing, listless embrace of wintertide—craves all sorts of shadows to cast light upon them. To witness the apparition of meaning beneath all that starlessness. To find meaning in suffering, to make more peace with it.

Healing doesn’t always happen peacefully, neither does acceptance. Our bodies get carried to such extreme lengths to get to the point of breathing evenly, feeling yet unfeeling pain, experiencing each moment with utter wonder, fervor, and gratitude.

And humans create from the abyss, from tar, from heart pieces, gutted bowels all to rid themselves of whatever afflicts them, even just a smidge of a vast (w)hole. They know they get closer to light when they submerge themselves deeper in darkness. Winter knows it well, too.

So, today I’m sharing four horror comics you should read in the hibernal dark—to make sense of their worlds to make sense of yours. While each story may evoke unease, dread, or grief, having read any of them you may also come out of the experience feeling relieved, awe-inspired, light even.

#1: Mimi’s Tales of Terror

2023’s Mimi’s Tales of Terror by the masterful Junji Ito is a reissue manga based on a ‘true-story’ urban legends anthology titled Shin Mimibukuro. Alas, Hirokatsu Kihara and Ichiro Nakayama’s book is impossible to seek out today, so Ito’s adaptation is the next best thing to consume to get closer to the truth of the haunting tales.

While Ito took significant liberties with the source material, Mimi’s mysterious and chilling adventures were clearly illustrated with utmost love, care, and respect to the authors and what they captured and enshrined into words.

An example of a great tale is “Grave Placement.” Mimi witnesses graves turning at night from her apartment window, engraved tormented faces staring back at her. Why and how they turn is a peculiar revelation I won’t spoil. Mimi’s Tales of Terror is visually stunning and spine-chilling, in case seasoned horror buffs doubt they could ever feel a frisson—or even haunting—again. Doubt no more!

At the heart of it, the manga wonderfully illustrates the divide between the living and the supernatural, how the two paradoxically co-exist, how courage and compassion are tested in tense situations. It incites the reader to ponder on earthly and unearthly mysteries, their own life mysteries, and seek answers or at least explanations that may alleviate the heavy burden in their heart.

#2: Spa

What do you get when you mix the ingenious works of David Lynch, Junji Ito, and Lars von Trier in a blender? You get a bizzarro cocktail that is Erik Svetoft’s first graphic novel Spa.

In Spa, a world-class resort’s luxurious façade gradually decays, with the staff and patrons in it losing their way, disappearing, becoming ill, or witnessing hauntings and monstrosities of inconceivable nightmares.

The graphic novel briefly critiques and satirizes many things such as boredom and insouciance of the wealthy, briberies in business operations, likewise the cracks in the wellness sphere. It portrays the hollow and rot with artscapes that feel both familiar and foreign but ultimately escalating to utter outlandishness and absurdity.

Others who have read it equated or compared Svetoft’s style to that of Cronenberg, Kafka, Lovecraft, among others. I was personally reminded of the Baker house in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Zdzisław Beksiński’a art, this music video, and the This Is Fine meme. I also remembered the Human Centipede trilogy exists, for better or worse.

#3: Goodbye, Eri

From the brilliant mind behind Chainsaw Man comes Goodbye, Eri, a one-shot manga that astutely and boldly probes the themes of loss, grief, suicide, abuse, and love. Tatsuki Fujimoto drew and wrote Goodbye, Eri in a terrificly cinematic way, taking the graphic novel medium to the next level of experiment and experience.

As for the story, it’s as unbelievable and intense as it gets. Yuta receives a smart phone from his parents on his 12th birthday. He documents his family life, including the mundane and their travels, while mostly being off-camera himself. In time, his mother gets sicker and requests for him to film her until her last breath.

With over 100 hours of footage, he makes a movie titled “Dead Explosion Mother” that he shows at school. Nobody understands his vision or sees through his suffering and mourning, all bar one: Eri.

Impassioned by Eri’s encouragement, he records her life, and it uncannily mirrors the experience and relationship he had with his mother. Would it be another failure that defines him or his greatest work yet? It’s for you to find out! (I’m seriously trying to not spoil as much as I can, for your own good and the good of your experience.)

Most striking of all is how cleverly and creatively Goodbye, Eri unfolds as a motion picture. The reader sees the movement whenever Yuta walks or runs. They feel the pauses and prolongation in narration through repeated and empty panels. They witness fantastical elements bleeding into real life. And soon they lose themselves in a reality turned fantasy turned reality and can no longer tell what’s real, what’s not. It’s a mindscrew I personally welcomed.

#4: Fangs

Relationships can be complicated enough by the banality of life, day-to-day problems, personality and value tensions, and so forth. But imagine sharing a life with a partner who is wildly different from you, and someone you want to either dote upon or devour.

Well, Sarah Andersen, the wonderful illustrator and writer of Sarah’s Scribbles, created a narrative where a vampire and werewolf get together in hope and love and try not to kill each other in the process with her graphic novel Fangs.

While this unlikely togetherness has been delved into before in literature and cinema, Fangs refreshingly depicts how love unveils with everyday challenges compounded by vampirism and lycanthropy. There are tropes, but they’re explored with humor and candor. If you enjoy a fairly light read with dad jokes focused on monster lore in a contemporary setting, this graphic novel is for you.

I thought about my relationship with my husband while reading Fangs. While we’re not vampires or lycans—although I jokingly imagine myself to be a century-old crone and he unseriously thinks he’s an AI implanted from the future—we do face a difficulty that unfortunately many couples don’t survive. We call it the elephant in the room, or my chronic health condition.

I feel hopefulness, however, in and through Fangs. If an improbable match has enough love, forgiveness, patience, and wisdom to make it work despite their grandiose and unbelievable problems, my robot and this ol’ lady have got this.

There’s so much darkness in the world, some of it in us too. Why then do I crave sitting still with the dusk, especially during winter, when my body floats and flails in my own dark ocean? All I can say is that: it’s not to hurt, but to heal.

I do feel an iota of healing through challenges that test my faith and will, while I don’t necessarily welcome them or think I deserve such suffering—no one does. And I do find meaning in art that faces the dark head-on, consuming of and creating from darkness being immensely releasing and enlightening.

I’m not the first to experience and say this, nor the last. And I’ll say this, as cliché as it sounds, light comes after dark. It always does and always will. We have that notion as comfort to survive the night.

Do you have any beloved darklings that have exorcized you? Tell me about them in the comments.

Yours hopefully,

Nadia

A tip for me? Why thank you!

Giveaway

To start 2024 on a beautiful note, I’m gifting these four comics to anyone who wants one. To participate all you have to do is fill out this form. The first four participants will each receive one book chosen at random. In case you don’t make the cut but want to participate in another giveaway, I’ll keep you in mind for the future. I’ll have the form open for a week.

May 2024 be your year. May you find your light, peace, and joy. May hope guide you. May you and your loved ones be well, happy, loved, and supported in every way possible. Happy 2024!