Are you a fan of Horror comics?
I remember it like it was yesterday, I was walking home from school with a friend of mine and we walked the usual route we always took but this time something was different.
A shop we’d walked past a hundred times now had something in the window that caught my eye, a KISS comic advertisement. As a HUGE fan of the band I finally step foot into the shop we’d walked by so many times and that was a life changing moment.
Whilst my initial draw was the KISS comic this seemingly innocent little shop turned out to be an eye opener as it was here that I discovered there was more to my beloved Horror than just the films, TV series or books, there was a whole other world to it all.
It was here that I discovered that there there were figurines, both big and small, that included some of my favourite film and characters. I remember my jaw being so wide open I could catch flies, my mind was buzzing with excitement at everything I was seeing.
This may not sound like much to some of you but for an impressionable kid who grew up in a small town who thought that comics and comic book stores were something you only saw in films or just in America alone, well it was a pretty big deal.
As I flicked through the boxes upon boxes of comics and viewed the shelves upon shelves of even more comics I discovered that so many of Horrors beloved characters’ stories were continuing in a different format and I had been missing out on them all.
I walked out of that store with my KISS comic vowing to come back and buy as many of the Horror comics as I could afford, unfortunately for me that turned out not to be many, like I said I was a young kid and I wasn’t exactly flush with cash, especially for luxuries like comics.
It took me a few years but little by little I saved and collected what I could and slowly but surely (although I must admit it was very slowly) I started to gather a small collection of Horror comics but I would soon discover that I had a long way to go to and I’d more than likely never get all that I was after.
That wasn’t a problem though, I had plenty to read and I was devouring every word, every panel, every detail and that excitement has never dulled, I’m still like that now and in an age where comics are the ‘cool’ thing again it means there’s more of them.
There has been some absolutely amazing releases over the years that may even surprise you, I mean did you know that ‘Jason Voorhees’ and ‘Freddy Kreuger’ have both continued to spill the blood of many innocent teenagers all over the pages of a comic?
Or that long before ‘Ash Williams’ finally returned to our screens in “Ash VS Evil Dead” you could still be entertained by his wit and the many entertaining predicaments he gets himself into, it’s still going strong and is one of my favourites to read.
In fact did you know that they released “Freddy VS Jason VS Ash”, a comic book sequel to the film “Freddy VS Jason”. There was two of them actually and they’re so well written and such a good read that people have been begging for a film to be made out of them.
Many other of your favourites such as ‘Chucky’, ‘Leatherface’, ‘Herbert West’, ‘Michael Myers’, ‘Pumpkinhead’, ‘The Thing’, ‘Puppet Master’, these are just some of the characters whose stories have carried on in comic book form.
Not including “Freddy VS Jason VS Ash” there have also been many other crossovers such as “Jason vs. Leatherface” and “Army Of Darkness VS Re-Animator” to name just a select couple, that is one of the many great things about these comic books though.
You can get sequels, prequels, spin offs, continuations and anthologies without actors ageing or being replaced by someone else, they can be timeless in this form, when you think about it it’s the perfect medium. There’s also a lot of originality, which I love.
I’ve had and continue to have so much entertainment from Horror comics, I still collect them and sm nowhere near close to my dream of completing my collections. For those of you who are thinking of starting, there are a plethora of choices, but I’ll let you make that discovery for yourself.
Raz's Midnight Macabre 