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It started with Patrick Neighly saying in The Paper Curtain
In my opinion, horror as a genre doesn’t work well in comics. I can’t name a single scary comic off the top of my head. None of the usual suspects are in any way frightening or suspenseful, which rather defeats the point and makes The Walking Dead the only “horror” book worth my money. Robert Kirkman seems to understand that shock tactics and gore don’t have the visceral effect of film or prose in comics, and presents what is essentially a survivalist soap opera cloaked in largely superfluous horror elements – although, I freely admit it could just be me.
And then Steven Grant concludes:
Neighly doesn't really make his case. It's more statement than argument.
But he's right.
...
Most "horror" movies depend on abrupt movement and quick-cut editing to make us jump in our seats. (...) Most horror films aren't even horrific. They depend on cutesy little tricks, and brutality, blood, liberal helpings of gore or the threat of it, and violence. So do most horror comics.
...
The only truly horrific, even scary, moment I remember in Alan's entire SWAMP THING run (which, as it went on, became increasingly satisfied to do little more in the way of horror than to present new, dislocating ideas) is in an issue often dismissed by ST fans as a minor throwaway, where Holland, wandering the swamp, encounters a serial killer. Little happens in the issue – it's mostly the killer's monologue – but there's one moment, purely conceptual, where the killer voices an idea so simple, so logical that it achieves a loathsome inescapability: the idea that killers like Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas, the ones who get all the publicity, are the inept ones, the ones who just aren't good enough to escape discovery and capture.
My italics.
Well, Neighly seems to associate horror with the trappings that have made modern teen horror so popular despite its mediocrity: gore, jump scenes and blunt shock tactics, so over the top they're more like parodies of the genre. Throughout his article, Neighly brings up zombie killing and other gory stuff as real 'horror.' Which comics can't -and should they? - obviously reproduce because they lack the realism and movement that movies can afford.
But Grant goes further and says horror in any medium is pretty difficult, if not impossible, but at least sees that whatever horror may exist is more than quick editing and badly-lit sets. He points out a monologue - just words - in Moore's ST as scary, which then shouldn't it make easy to produce horror in comics, since words are one of the medium's strenghts? And what can we say about the silent, long panel sequences in comics like From Hell and Watchmen? Rorschach finding out the little girl was fed to the dogs still leaves me depressed whenever I read it. And the claustrophobic 'autopsy' of Mary Kelly?
Are those two making the common mistake of judging comics on the strenghts of other media? And isn't Grant contradicting himself by defining horror as "an idea is presented that upends our comfortable notions of the nature of things and subverts them with a logic antithetic to everything we love and cherish," and ignoring that comics have the tools to achieve this effect? And exactly what is horror? |
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