Horror comics

Horror comics are comic books, graphic novels, black-and-white comics magazines, and manga focusing on horror fiction. Horror comic books reached a peak in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, when concern over content and the imposition of the self-censorship Comics Code Authority contributed to the demise of many titles and the toning down of others. Black-and-white horror-comics magazines, which did not fall under the Code, flourished from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s from a variety of publishers. Mainstream American color comic books experienced a horror resurgence in the 1970s, following a loosening of the Code. While the genre has had greater and lesser periods of popularity, it occupies a firm niche in comics as of the 2010s.

Precursors to horror comics include detective and crime comics that incorporated horror motifs into their graphics, and early superhero stories that sometimes included the likes of ghouls and vampires. Individual horror stories appeared as early as 1940. The first dedicated horror comic books appear to be Gilberton Publications' Classic Comics #13 (Aug. 1943), with its full-length adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Avon Publications' anthology Eerie Comics #1 (Jan. 1947), the first horror comic with original content. The first horror-comics series is the anthology Adventures into the Unknown, premiering in 1948 from American Comics Group, initially under the imprint B&I Publishing.

Precursors
The horror tradition in sequential-art narrative traces back to at least the 12th-century Heian period Japanese scroll "Gaki Zoshi", or the scroll of hungry ghosts (紙本著色餓鬼草紙)  and the 16th-century Mixtec codices.

In the early 20th century, pulp magazines developed the horror sub-genre "weird menace", which featured sadistic villains and graphic scenes of Torture and brutality. The first such title, Popular Publications' Dime Mystery, began as a straight crime fiction magazine but evolved by 1933 under the influence of Grand Guignol theater. Other publishers eventually joined in, though Popular dominated the field with Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales. While most weird-menace stories were resolved with rational explanations, some involved the supernatural. After the fledgling medium of comic books became established by the late 1930s, horror-fiction elements began appearing in superhero stories, with vampires, misshapen creatures, mad scientists and other tropes that bore the influence of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and other sources. By the mid-1940s, some detective and crime comics had incorporated horror motifs such as spiders and eyeballs into their graphics, and occasionally featured stories adapted from the literary horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe or other writers, or stories from the pulps and radio programs. The single-issue Harvey Comics anthologies Front Page Comic Book (1945), bearing a cover with a knife-wielding, skeletal ghoul, and Strange Story (July 1946), introduced writer-artist Bob Powell's character the Man in Black, an early comic-book example of the type of omniscient-observer host used in such contemporary supernatural and suspense radio dramas as Inner Sanctum, Suspense and The Whistler.

As cultural historian David Hajdu notes, comic-book horror

Early American horror comics
Issue #7 (Dec. 1940) of publisher Prize Comics' flagship title, Prize Comics, introduced writer-artist Dick Briefer's eight-page feature "New Adventures of Frankenstein", an updated version of novelist Mary Shelley's much-adapted Frankenstein monster. Called "America's first ongoing comic book series to fall squarely within the horror genre" by historian Don Markstein, and "[t]he first real horror series" by horror-comics historian Lawrence Watt-Evans, the feature ran through Prize Comics #52 (April 1945) before becoming a humor series and then being revived in horrific form in the series Frankenstein #18-33 (March 1952 - Nov. 1954).

Gilberton Publications' 60-page Classic Comics #12 (June 1943) adapted Washington Irving's Short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a backup feature to Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" in a package titled Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. The next issue, Classic Comics #13 (Aug. 1943), adapted Robert Louis Stevenson's horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the full-length story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, making it the earliest known dedicated horror comic book.

Historian Ron Goulart, making no mention of those earlier literary adaptations, identifies Avon Publications' Eerie Comics #1, dated January 1947 and sold in late 1946, as "the first out-and-out horror comic book". Its cover featured a red-eyed, pointy-eared fiend threatening a rope-bound, beautiful young woman in a scanty red evening gown, set amid a moonlit ruin. The anthology offered six primarily occult stories involving the likes of a ghost and a zombie. While all but one writer are unknown — Edward Bellin, who teamed with young artist Joe Kubert on the nine-page "The Man-Eating Lizards" — the artists include George Roussos and Fred Kida. After this first issue, the title went dormant, but reappeared in 1951 as Eerie, beginning with a new #1 and running 17 issues (1951 - Sept. 1954).

Goulart identifies the long-running Adventures into the Unknown (Fall 1948- Aug. 1967), from American Comics Group, initially under the imprint B&I Publishing, as "the first continuing-series horror comic". The first two issues, which included art by Fred Guardineer and others, featured horror stories of ghosts, werewolves, haunted houses, killer puppets and other supernatural beings and locales. The premiere included a seven-page, abridged adaptation of Horace Walpole's seminal gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, by an unknown writer and artist Al Ulmer.

Following the postwar crime comics vogue spearheaded by publisher Lev Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay, which by 1948 was selling over a million copies a month, came romance comics, which by 1949 outsold all other genres, and horror comics. The same month in which Adventures into the Unknown premiered, the comic-book company EC, which would become the most prominent horror-comics publisher of the 1950s, published its first horror story, "Zombie Terror", by an unknown writer and artist Johnny Craig, in the superhero comics Moon Girl #5 Almost simultaneously,Trans-World Publications issued its one-and-only comic, the one-shot Mysterious Traveler Comics #1 (Nov. 1948), based on the Mutual Broadcasting Network's radio show of that name and including amid its crime and science-fiction stories a reprint of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation "The Tell Tale Heart", reprinted from Charlton Comics' Yellowjacket Comics #6.

The floodgates began to open the following year with the first horror comic from the 1950s' most prolific horror-comics publisher, Atlas Comics, the decade's forerunner of Marvel Comics. While horror had been an element in 1940s superhero stories from the original predecessor company, Timely Comics, through the war years, "when zombies, vampires, werewolves, and even pythonmen were to be found working for the Nazis and the Japanese." the publisher entered the horror arena full-tilt with Amazing Mysteries #32 (May 1949), continuing the numbering of the defunct superhero series Sub-Mariner Comics, followed by the superhero anthology Marvel Mystery Comics becoming the horror series Marvel Tales with #93 (Aug. 1949) and the final two issues of Captain America Comics becoming the mostly horror-fiction Captain America's Weird Tales #74-75 (Oct. 1949 & Feb. 1950) — the latter of which did not contain Captain America at all. Harvey Comics followed suit with its costumed-crimefighter comic Black Cat by reformatting it as the horror comic Black Cat Mystery with issue #30 (Aug. 1951).

EC Comics and the horror boom
Horror comics briefly flourished from this point until the industry's self-imposed censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, was instituted in late 1954. The most influential and enduring horror-comics anthologies of this period, beginning 1950, were the 91 issues of EC Comics' three series: The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror and Crypt of Terror, renamed Tales from the Crypt.

In 1947, publisher William Gaines had inherited what was then Educational Comics upon the death of his father, Maxwell Gaines. Three years later, Gaines and editor Al Feldstein introduced horror in two of the company's crime comics to test the waters. Finding them successful, the publisher quickly turned them and a Western series into EC's triumvirate of horror. Additionally, the superhero comic Moon Girl, which had become the romance comic A Moon ... a Girl ... A Romance, became the primarily science fiction anthology Weird Fantasy. For the next four years, sardonic horror hosts the Old Witch, the Vault Keeper and the Crypt Keeper introduced stories drawn by such top artists and soon-to-be-famous newcomers as Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels (who signed his work "Ghastly"), Jack Kamen, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Wally Wood. Feldstein did most of the early scripting, writing a story a day with twist endings and poetic justice taken to absurd extremes.

EC's success immediately spawned a host of imitators, such as Ziff-Davis' and P.L. Publishing's Weird Adventures, St. John Publications' Weird Horrors, Key Publications' Weird Chills, Weird Mysteries and Weird Tales of the Future, Comic Media's Weird Terror, Ziff-Davis' Weird Thrillers, and Star Publications' Ghostly Weird Stories. Others included Quality Comics' Web of Evil, Ace Comics' Web of Mystery, Premier Magazines' Horror from the Tomb Harvey Comics' Tomb of Terror and Witches Tales, Avon Comics', Witchcraft, Ajax-Farrell Publications' Fantastic Fears, Fawcett Comics' Worlds of Fear, Charlton Comics' The Thing, and a slew from Atlas Comics, including Adventures into Weird Worlds, Adventures into Terror, Menace, Journey into Mystery, and Strange Tales. Indeed, from 1949 through comics cover-dated March 1955, Atlas released 399 issues of 18 horror titles, AGC released 123 issues of five horror titles, and Ace Comics, 98 issues of five titles — each more than EC's output.

Backlash
In the late 1940s, comic books – particularly crime comics – had become the target of mounting public criticism for their content and their potentially harmful effects on children, with "accusations from several fronts [that] charged comic books with contributing to the rising rates of Juvenile delinquency". Many city and county ordinances had banned some publications, though these were effectively overturned with a March 29, 1948, United States Supreme Court ruling that a 64-year-old New York State law outlawing publications with "pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime" was unconstitutional. Regardless, the uproar increased upon the publication of two articles: "Horror in the Nursery", by Judith Crist, in the March 25, 1948, issue Collier's Weekly, based upon the symposium "Psychopathology of Comic Books" held a week earlier by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham; and Wertham's own features "The Comics ... Very Funny!" in the May 29, 1948, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, and a March 19, 1948 symposium called "Psychopathology of Comic Books" which stated that comic books were "abnormally sexually aggressive" and led to crime.

In response to public pressure and bad press, an industry trade group, the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP) was formed with the intent of prodding the industry to police itself. The Association proved ineffective as few publishers joined and those who did exercised little restraint over the content of their titles.

Seduction of the Innocent
In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a tome that claimed horror, crime and other comics were a direct cause of Juvenile delinquency. Wertham asserted, largely based on undocumented anecdotes, that reading violent comic books encouraged violent behavior in children. Wertham painted a picture of a large and pervasive industry, shrouded in secrecy and masterminded by a few, that operated upon the innocent and defenseless minds of the young. He further suggested the industry strong-armed vendors into accepting their publications and forced artists and writers into producing the content against their will.

Wertham alleged comics stimulated deviant sexual behavior. He noted female breasts in comics protruded in a provocative way and special attention was lavished upon the female genital region. A cover by Matt Baker from Phantom Lady was reprinted in the book with the caption, "Sexual stimulation by combining 'headlights' with the sadist's dream of tying up a woman". Boys interviewed by Wertham said they used comic book images for masturbation purposes, and one young comics reader confessed he wanted to be a sex maniac. Wertham contended comics promoted Homosexuality by pointing to the Batman–Robin relationship and calling it a homosexual wish dream of two men living together. He observed that Robin was often pictured standing with his legs spread and the genital region evident.

Most alarming, Wertham contended that comic books turned children into deceitful little beings, reading funny-animal comics in front of their parents but turning to horror comics the moment their parents left the room. Wertham warned of suspicious stores and their clandestine back rooms where second hand comics of the worst sort were peddled to children. The language used evoked images of children prowling about gambling dens and whorehouses, and anxious parents felt helpless in the face of such a powerful force as the comics industry. Excerpts from the book were published in Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest, lending respectability and credibility to Wertham's arguments.

A 14-page portfolio of panels and covers from across the entire comic book industry displayed murder, torture and sexual titillation for the reader's consideration. The most widely discussed art was that from "Foul Play", a horror story from EC about a dishonest baseball player whose head and intestines are used by his teammates in a game. Seduction of the Innocent sparked a firestorm of controversy and created alarm in parents, teachers and others interested in the welfare of children; the concerned were galvanized into campaigning for censorship.

Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency
Public criticism brought matters to a head. In 1954, anti-crime crusader Estes Kefauver led the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Dr. Wertham insisted upon appearing before the committee. He first presented a long list of his credentials, and then, in his clipped German accent, spoke with authority on the pernicious influence of comic books upon children. His passionate testimony at the hearings impressed the gathering. Kefauver suggested crime comics indoctrinated children in a way similar to Nazi propaganda. Wertham noted Hitler was a beginner compared to the comics industry.



Publisher William Gaines appeared before the committee and vigorously defended his product and the industry. He took full responsibility for the horror genre, claiming he was the first to publish such comics. He insisted that delinquency was the result of the real environment and not fictional reading materials. His defiant demeanor left the committee (which felt the industry was indefensible), astonished. He had prepared a statement that read in part, "It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid."

Crime Suspenstories, issue 22, April/May 1954, was entered into evidence. The exchange between Gaines and Kefauver led to a front-page story in The New York Times:

"He was asked by Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, if he considered in "good taste" the cover of his Shock SuspensStories, which depicted an axe-wielding man holding aloft the severed head of a blond woman. Mr. Gaines replied: "Yes, I do — for the cover of a horror comic.""

Though the committee's final report did not blame comics for crime, it recommended that the comics industry tone down its content voluntarily.

The creation of the Comics Code
By 1953, nearly a quarter of all comic books published were horror titles. In the immediate aftermath of the hearings, however, several publishers were forced to revamp their schedules and drastically censor or even cancel many long-standing comic series.

In September 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) and its Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed. The Code had many stipulations that made it difficult for horror comics to continue publication, since any that didn't adhere to the Code's guidelines would likely not find distribution. The Code forbade the explicit presentation of "unique details and methods of crime...Scenes of excessive violence...brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime...all scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism...Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, or torture".

Perseverance
As a result of the Congressional hearings, DC Comics shifted its ongoing horror titles, House of Mystery (1951–1987) and House of Secrets (1956–1966), toward the suspense and mystery genres, often with a science fiction bent. In fact, from 1964–1968, House of Mystery became a mostly superhero title, featuring J'onn J'onzz, the Manhunter from Mars and, later, Dial H for Hero. Similarly, during this period Marvel Comics produced the titles Strange Tales (1951–1968) and Journey into Mystery (1952–1966).

The publishers Gilberton, Dell Comics, and Gold Key Comics did not become signatories to the Comics Code, relying on their reputations as publishers of wholesome comic books. Classics Illustrated had adapted such horror novels as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in comic book form, and quickly issued reprints with new, less gruesome covers. Dell began publishing the licensed TV series comic book Twilight Zone in 1961 and publishing a Dracula title in 1962 (though only the first issue was horror related; the subsequent issues were part of the super-hero genre revival). Gold Key, in addition to releasing Boris Karloff Thriller, based on the TV series Thriller (and retitled Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery after the show went off the air), bought the Twilight Zone license from Dell in 1962.

In 1965 Gold Key put out three licensed horror-themed comics, two based on the TV horror-comedies The Addams Family and The Munsters, and the other titled Ripley's Believe it or Not!, which had three different subtitles: "True Ghost Stories," "True War Stories" (#1 and #5), and "True Demons & Monsters" (#7, #10, #19, #22, #25, #26, and #29).

Warren Publishing continued the horror tradition in the mid-1960s, bypassing the Comics Code Authority restrictions by publishing magazine-sized black-and-white horror comics. Under the direction of line editor Archie Goodwin, Warren debuted the horror anthologies Creepy (1964–1983) and Eerie (1966–1983), followed by Vampirella, an anthology with a lead feature starring a sexy young female vampire.

The low-rent Warren imitator Eerie Publications also jumped into the black-and-white horror magazine business, mixing new material with reprints from pre-Comics Code horror comics, most notably in its flagship title Weird (1966–1981), as well as the magazines Tales of Voodoo (1968–1974), Horror Tales (1969–1979), Tales from the Tomb (1969–1975), and Terror Tales (1969–1979). Stanley Publications also published a line of black-and-white horror magazines from 1966–1971, including the titles Shock and Chilling Tales of Horror.

Resurgence
A number of supernatural mystery / suspense titles were introduced in the latter half of the 1960s, including Charlton Comics' Ghostly Tales, The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, and Ghost Manor; and Marvel Comics' Chamber of Darkness/Monsters on the Prowl and Tower of Shadows/Creatures on the Loose. At DC Comics, new House of Mystery editor Joe Orlando returned the title to its horror roots with issue #175 (July/Aug. 1968), while the company debuted the new titles The Unexpected and The Witching Hour.

In 1971, the Comics Code Authority relaxed some of its longstanding rules regarding horror comics, which opened the door to more possibilities in the genre: "Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with, walking dead or torture shall not be used. Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high-caliber literary works written by Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle, and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world."

Following this, Marvel returned to publishing true horror by first introducing a scientifically created, vampire-like character, Morbius, followed by the introduction of Dracula in Tomb of Dracula. This opened the floodgates for more horror titles, such as the anthology Supernatural Thrillers, Werewolf by Night, and two series in which Satan or a Satan-like lord of Hell figured, Ghost Rider and the feature "Son of Satan." In addition, following Warren Publishing's longtime lead, Marvel's parent company in 1971 launched a black-and-white magazine imprint, Curtis Magazines, which published a number of horror titles, including Dracula Lives!, Monsters Unleashed, Vampire Tales, Tales of the Zombie, Haunt of Horror, and Masters of Terror. Additionally, Skywald Publications offered the black-and-white horror-comics magazines Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream.

DC during this time continued to publish supernatural fiction and occasional horror stories in such titles as Ghosts, The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love (later titled Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion), Secrets of Haunted House, Secrets of Sinister House, Swamp Thing, Weird Mystery Tales, Weird War Tales, and Tales of Ghost Castle. Charlton continued in this vein as well, with Ghostly Haunts, Haunted, Midnight Tales, Haunted Love, and Scary Tales.

Underground cartoonists, many of them strongly influenced by 1950s EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt, also tried their hands at horror. Titles like Skull (Rip Off Press, 1970), Bogeyman (San Francisco Comic Book Company, 1969), Fantagor (Richard Corben, 1970), Insect Fear (Print Mint, 1970), Up From The Deep (Rip Off Press, 1971), Death Rattle (Kitchen Sink Press, 1972), Gory Stories (Shroud, 1972), Deviant Slice (Print Mint, 1972) and Two-Fisted Zombies (Last Gasp, 1973) appeared in the early 1970s.

By the mid-1970s, the horror comics boomlet had faded and only a few titles persevered. DC, Warren, and Charlton canceled the last of their horror anthologies by the mid-1980s, and other than DC's Swamp Thing and FantaCo's Gore Shriek, the genre lay dormant for the rest of the decade.

North America
The smaller American publishers have also published a number of successful horror comics franchises. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent publishers FantaCo Enterprises and Millennium Publications boasted lineups almost exclusively devoted to horror, vampire, and zombie comics. For instance, 1986 saw the debut of FantaCo's horror anthology Gore Shriek, edited by Stephen R. Bissette, who also contributed stories to each issue. Bissette also edited the acclaimed anthology Taboo, which ran from 1988–1995. In the mid-1990s Harris Publications also revived Vampirella. At Image Comics, Robert Kirkman has created The Walking Dead, which helped to revitalize the zombie genre. Steve Niles predominantly writes horror comics, and his 30 Days of Night has spawned a range of mini-series released by IDW Publishing. At Dark Horse, Mike Mignola has been working on Hellboy, and has created a large fictional universe with spin-off titles like BPRD and Lobster Johnson.

In 1982, Pacific Comics produced two series that, while admittedly inspired by the E.C. Comics of the 1950s, foresaw the form that horror comics would take in the coming decades. Printed in color on high-quality paper stock despite a higher cover price, the series Twisted Tales and Alien Worlds were short-lived and hard-pressed to keep to a regular production schedule, but offered some of the most explicitly brutal and sexual stories yet to be widely distributed in a mainstream ("non-underground") format. The series soon shifted to Eclipse Comics production, which also produced very similar titles such as The Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones and Alien Encounters. Later horror titles from DC's Vertigo line had more in common with these Pacific/Eclipse efforts, and more success, than DC's sporadic efforts to revive or maintain the traditional horror comic title (e.g. Elvira's House of Mystery).

In 1982, DC Comics revived the Swamp Thing series, attempting to capitalize on the summer 1982 release of the Wes Craven film of the same name. (The revival had actually been originally planned for 1978, but was a victim of the DC Implosion.) In 1984, British writer Alan Moore took over the writing chores on the title, and when Karen Berger took over as editor, she gave Moore free rein to revamp the title and the character as he saw fit. Moore reconfigured Swamp Thing's origin to make him a true monster as opposed to a human transformed into a monster. Moore's (and artists Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben's) Swamp Thing was a critical and commercial success, and in 1988 spun off the ongoing series Hellblazer, starring occult detective John Constantine. In 1993 DC introduced its mature-readers Vertigo line, which folded in a number of popular horror titles, including Hellblazer and Swamp Thing. One of Vertigo's early successes was Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which reworked a number of DC's old horror characters and added fantasy to the mix. A number of other horror titles carried on at Vertigo, like Deadman, House of Mystery and Haunted Tank, or were given a horror spin or an update like Kid Eternity and Jonah Hex. Vertigo also published more conventional horror, like vampires in Bite Club (beginning in 2004), and Vamps. In addition, from 1999–2001 they published their own horror anthology, Flinch.

In the 1990s, Marvel published its "Midnight Sons" line of horror comics that included such series as a revived Ghost Rider, Nightstalkers, Darkhold: Pages from the Book of Sins and Midnight Sons Unlimited. In the 2000s and 2010s, the company produced Blade and the Marvel Zombies franchise. Marvel's adult imprint MAX, introduced in 2001, has also provided a venue for reinterpretations of Marvel horror characters where more violence can be used, leading to the Dead of Night miniseries based on Devil-Slayer, Werewolf by Night and Man-Thing, as well as a reworking of Zombie and Hellstorm: Son of Satan. Richard Corben has also been writing Haunt of Horror, a number of series based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.

Great Britain
In the post-World War II period, horror comics arrived in Britain, largely based on reprints of American material. This led to protests similar to those in the States. In 1955, the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act was introduced, which saw the horror reprints disappear from the news agents' shelves.

In the early seventies there were a couple of horror comics, Shiver and Shake and Monster Fun, but these were also humour titles pitched at younger children. It was only during the boom in British comics in the late seventies and early eighties that there were horror comics pitched at older boys and girls, Scream! and Misty, respectively. Whether it was fears over the content, or the difficult financial times in the mid-eighties, but Scream! stopped publishing in 1985, with only two of its stories being merged with the Eagle. Lord horror also was published.

After the collapse in comics the only mainstream venue was 2000 AD, which has featured stories like Chiaroscuro and Cradlegrave, as well as those drawing on the Cthulhu Mythos like Necronauts and Caballistics. The British small press also publishes horror comics, like the anthology Something Wicked. In 2008, the London Horror Comic launched, becoming the first dedicated full-colour UK horror comic to be shipped worldwide through Diamond Comic Distributors.

Japan
Just like Gekiga, horror manga started to appear in the lending libraries (Kashihonya) of the late 1950s and early 1960s and expanded into the mainstream through the works of artists like Shigeru Mizuki (GeGeGe no Kitaro), Jirō Tsunoda (Kyōfu Shimbun), Kazuo Umezu (The Drifting Classroom) and Shin'ichi Koga (Eko Eko Azarak). While most of them published in Shōnen magazines and often with scary, yet sympathetic protagonists leading through tales about ghosts and demons, Umezu for instance got his start in shōjo magazines, where psychological depth was the main focus, a famous title being Hebi Shōjo.

The subculture also continued publishing horror manga. Hideshi Hino created lots of stories for the alternative magazine Garo and for the publisher Hibari Shobō, which specialized in horror manga in the 1970s. Suehiro Maruo followed the traditions of the Ero guro movement of the 1920s and included extreme depictions of gore in his works.

Horror stayed a niche in mainstream manga. There was no magazine specialized solely on horror comics until the 1980s, when Asahi Sonorama founded Halloween magazine in 1986 due to the recent success of artists like Ryōko Takashina in mainstream shōjo magazines like Ribon. Junji Itō became the most famous contributor to the magazine with his Tomie series. Similar publications like Horror M (Bunkasha), also mainly targeted at women, started to appear. Magazines like Nemuki (Asahi Sonorama), Susperia Mystery (Akita Shoten) and Apple Mystery (Shufu to Seikatsusha) were also founded as part of this movement, but concentrated on more subtle and less graphic depictions of horror. Artists drawing for those magazine like Ichiko Ima (Hyakkiyakō Shō), Matsuri Akino (Pet Shop of Horrors) and Narumi Kakinouchi (Vampire Princess Miyu) became famous.

Horror webcomics
Horror comics are also published on the web, with horror webcomics that include High Moon and Eric Monster Millikin.

Other media
Comics have formed part of the media franchise for popular horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Army of Darkness. They have also been adapted from horror video games, like Silent Hill.

Horror comics have also been sources for horror films, such as 30 Days of Night, Hellboy and Blade, and, from horror manga, such films as Uzumaki and two 1980s movies directed by comics creator Hideshi Hino adapted from his manga Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood and Guinea Pig: Mermaid in a Manhole. Robert Kirkman's comic-book series The Walking Dead was adapted in 2010 into an ongoing TV series on the AMC cable network.

Some horror films and television programs have had comic-book sequels, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, as well as Prequels or interstitial stories, such as Saw: Rebirth and 28 Days Later: The Aftermath, respectively.

Horror hosts
In the 1930s-1950s, radio dramatic anthology series devoted to horror and suspense plays, such as Lights Out, Quiet, The Whistler, and Inner Sanctum Mysteries, had more or less sinister "hosts" who introduced and wrapped up the stories. This tradition was introduced into horror comics, many of which were also anthology titles, with many stories in each issue.

EC Comics utilized the conceit of a character who "hosted" the book, often starring in a framing sequence at the beginning of each issue. The most notorious EC hosts were the "GhouLunatics": The Crypt Keeper, The Old Witch, and The Vault-Keeper. In the 1960s, Warren came up with the hosts Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, and DC followed suit with their hosts Cain and Abel (as well as such minor hosts as Eve, Destiny, Lucien, and the Mad Mod Witch). Charlton had a large cast of hosts for their various horror/suspense titles. Marvel Comics never really embraced the host character for their various titles, though for a short time they did use Digger and Headstone P. Gravely.

The following is a list of hosts from various horror comics titles from over the years.