By John W. Morehead

I grew up in the 1970s and have fond memories of walking home from elementary school and cutting through the small local grocery store each day. Right near the entrance were a couple of magazine racks that featured the latest comic books and MAD magazine. With great eagerness we would spin the racks to see if anything new had been put out, and if we were lucky to find something of interest, and had remembered to bring a few quarters, we could bring our favorites home to read.

My brother and I enjoyed superhero comics like many of our friends, but I was especially drawn to the darker magazines, those we would consider horror comics today. Back in the day I remember enjoying titles like Ghost Rider, The Tomb of Dracula, The Man-Thing, and Morbius. For me, while Daredevil and Spider Man were fun to read (I was an obvious Marvel fan over DC), it was the horror comics that I enjoyed most.

Fast forward to the present and I still find myself drawn to horror comics. My appreciation for horror in general is enjoyed in various forms, from films to television (including the great experience of made-for-TV horror of the 1970s now available streaming or on Blu-ray), as well as comics and graphic novels. I have been able to track down reprint collections of some of my favorite horror comics from my childhood and enjoy contemporary graphic novels that depict the terrifying and horrific.

Given this background I was thrilled when Matthew Brake asked my frequent co-editor, Brandon R. Grafius, and if we’d be interested in working on a project looking at horror comics and religion. This was to be the first book in a series exploring comics and religion. The result is Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and Divine (forthcoming from McFarland). The project gave me an opportunity to work with a number of contributors who explored a few comics that I was familiar with, but most not.

In the Introduction, Brandon and I discuss the process of reading a comic: a series of sequential images in frames with dialogue and narrative text are viewed and read. The reader interprets a flow from the images in the frame as well as the spaces in between. The result is that a comic or graphic novel provides the reader with a “moving” story from a set of still images, the resulting experience transcending the format of static images and text. Our Introduction notes a parallel in our understanding of the monstrous. These creatures represent our personal and cultural fears, moving beyond the boundaries of familiar categories and exploding beyond them and becoming embodiments of our deepest angst. So, while comic images go beyond the frames to become something greater in the imagination than the form in which they are expressed, so too monsters and other expressions of horror become something far more than their depiction of any given monstrous creature, no matter how familiar.

In this volume the reader will find an interesting exploration of horror comics through fourteen essays organized into four sections, including The Classics, To Hell and Back, Beyond Marvel and DC, and concluding with Breaking the Frames. Along the way familiar classics like the 1950s EC Comics are discussed, as well as Ghost Rider, the topic of exorcism in comics, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the work of Junjeei Ito, and much more.

Sometimes as an editor you find the text providing you with new insights, and in this instance, a reminder that horror comes in different ways. This was the case in my reading of the contribution by Yvonne Chireau in her essay titled “Religion and Racial Horror: Comics Voodoo in the Golden Age.” The depiction of Voodoo that functions as a racist trope is a research specialization for Chireau. It was fascinating as well as unsettling to read her essay and to look at the accompanying racialized images that depict Voodoo as an exotic and dangerous religion practiced by a dangerous people with Black skin. It was a reminder that our use of horror can not only be cathartic, giving release to pent up fears, but also troubling as an expression of deeply held prejudices.

So, if you enjoy horror comics, and want to dive a little more deeply into how they intertwine with religion, this is the volume for you. During this spooky season why not grab your favorite horror comic and graphic novel, and after enjoying that fright, pick up Horror Comics and Religion and shed a little light into the darkness on religion’s connection to graphic fears.

John W. Morehead is an independent scholar who specializes in new religious movements, the intersection of religion and popular culture, and interreligious conflict. He lives in Syracuse, Utah.