Horror and Comics

Editor(s) Barbara Chamberlin,Kom Kunyosying,Julia Round

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Criticism

Series: Horror Studies

  • April 2025 · 296 pages ·216x138mm

  • · Hardback - 9781837722556
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781837722563
  • · eBook - epub - 9781837722570

About The Book

This collection investigates the evolution of comics and horror by analysing a range of approaches and traditions. International contributors explore how multiple aspects of comics (forms, cultures, histories) have contributed to the depiction and development of horror across many subgenres (folk horror, ecohorror, gothic romance and more); their chapters also show how horror has informed the development of comics across multiple periods, places and genres, from seventeenth-century broadsheets to newspaper strips, weeklies and contemporary graphic novels, spanning Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and USA. By considering well-known horror comics alongside understudied ones, this book re-examines and re-energises established concepts, such as the abject, the Other and closure, applying them to diverse texts, contexts, authors and audiences, and demonstrating the potential of comics and horror to encourage innovations of form and content in each other.

Contents

List of Illustrations and Captions
Notes on Contributors
Introduction – Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round
PART ONE: Crossing Genres, Blurring Boundaries
Multimodal Mirroring in ‘The Black Cat’ – Elizabeth Allyn Woock
Satanic Feminism and Decadent Aesthetics in Guido Crepax’s ‘Valentina’ Comics – Miranda Corcoran
The Living, the Dead and the Living Dead: Brazilian Horror Imagery and Genre Hybridisation in Shiko‘s Três Buracos – Tiago José Lemos I Monteiro and Heitor Da Luz Silva
Befriending the Past: The Genre-Bending Vanessa Comics Series (1982–1990) and its Historical Context – Barbara M. Eggert
PART TWO: Identity, Agency, Humanity
‘I’m not who he thinks I am’: Identity and Victimhood in Country Horror Comics – Matthew Costello
‘What’s one more monster?’: Articulations of Latinx Monstrosity and Whiteness in Border Town – Anna Marta Marini
‘Still pretty, ain’t she?’: The Female Gaze and the Queer Monstrous Feminine in Itō Junji’s Tomie – Keiko Miyajima
Sinister Houses and Forbidden Loves: Queer Identity in DC’s Gothic Romances – Lillian Hochwender
PART THREE: Society, Anxiety, Politics
Abjection, Ambivalence and the Abyss in EC’s New Trend Line – Alex Link
The Power of a Demon and the Heart of a Human: The Darkness of Humanity in Devilman – Meriel Dhanowa
Where the Wild Things Really Are: Comics and the Horrors of Reality – Dirk Vanderbeke and Doreen Triebel
‘REALITY scarier than any boogeyman’: Shock, Exploitation, and Environmentalism in Slow Death Funnies – Christy Tidwell
Afterwords – Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round

About the Editor(s)

Author(s): Barbara Chamberlin

Barbara Chamberlin is Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton. She has published on comics and horror, folklore, and walking as creative practice.

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Author(s): Kom Kunyosying

Kom Kunyosying is an independent scholar who studies visual and iconic representations of ethnicity. He has published on horror, ecology, geek culture, and the hillbilly in comics and other media.

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Author(s): Julia Round

Julia Round is an Associate Professor at Bournemouth University. She has published over fifty academic works on horror, comics and children’s literature, including the award-winning monograph Gothic for Girls (2019).

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