March 9th, 2023
Horror Comics
Your home for the spooky, the supernatural, and things that just ain’t right.
This week, we’re taking a look at a medium that too-often goes overlooked when discussing horror as a genre: comics. Whether you prefer traditional western comics, manga, or webcomics, we’ve got you covered.Through the Woodsby Emily Carroll
Each one of the fives stories featured in Carroll’s debut horror comic anthology features, in some form, woods—ventured into, avoided, emerged from. I first got into Carroll’s work when her short comic “His Face All Red” about a man whose dead brother walks into town, went viral in 2013. Imagine my delight when she published a physical collection of her works. This collection includes some old favorites, like “His Face All Red,” that had existed in a digital format on her site, alongside tales original to Through the Woods. Carroll has a knack for raising questions that will never be answered, in the way that all of the best horror stories do. Whether you like it or not, you’ll find her stories lingering in the back of your head for a long time to come.Yuna & Kawachanby Lauren Schmidt
After her town is besieged by monsters and she is left stranded, high school student Yuna meets Kawachan, a silent, sweet individual dressed in the costume of a local theme park’s mascot. The two become fast friends as they travel through the Japanese countryside, searching for Yuna’s missing friends and family, dodging ravenous monsters along the way. And then there are the opportunistic people they meet along the way, who might prove to be just as dangerous as the monsters. Yuna & Kawachan is a page-turner in every sense of the word, except that, as a webcomic, it doesn’t have pages to flip. Perhaps it’s time to think of a new word for digital properties. Scroller? Page-clicker? Whatever you’d like to call it, with its lovable cast and gripping story, Yuna & Kawachan is one comic you won’t want to put down. Read it for free on Webtoon.Dorohedoroby Q Hayashida
Welcome to the future, where sorcerers and humans fight for power, devils run rampant, and acid falls from the sky. After an encounter with a sorcerer leaves our protagonist, Caiman, with a reptile head and no memory of his past life, he vows to hunt down the sorcerer responsible with the help of his friend Nikaido. This, of course, involves biting the heads of every sorcerer he encounters. Simple, right?How do I describe Dorohedoro? It feels like a bizarre dream sequence, but one you don’t want to wake up from because even when bad things are happening, it never feels dire, just strange, riveting, and funny. The characters, awful as they are, are lovable in all of their oddities, and while it’s difficult to empathize with any of them, that’s part of what makes Dorohedoro so fun. Hayashida builds a unique world in the truest sense of the word, one filled with weirdos of every caliber.Dorohedoro also received an anime adaptation in 2020 that is available to watch on Netflix, but Hayashida’s artstyle is so insane that if you skip the manga, you’re missing out.The Girl From the Other Sideby Nagabe
Meditative and Ghibli-esque, The Girl From the Other Side follows a human girl and her monster caretaker whose touch could curse her. It’s very sweet, and the scenes between the girl, Shiva, and the being she refers to only as Teacher is surprisingly calming. There’s more going on in the broader world around them, of course. Nagabe unravels the workings of our characters’ world slowly, allowing us to learn about the world naturally through our characters—particularly the naive Shiva, who has yet to realize that she has been abandoned by those she loves in the Outside, where cursed beings reside. Nagabe’s artstyle is easily one of the most endearing in manga today. The backgrounds resemble Monet paintings, simple and lovingly rendered. The character designs themselves are just as gorgeous, making The Girl From the Other Side a feast for the eyes as well as the heart..
—Kana Coonce, Horror Editor