Toby Finch reads far too many comics and justifies this with the belief that you will in some way care about what hethinks of them. Please humour him.

24th February 2008.

When I was young and my heart was an open book and love was a battlefield and so on and so forth, gore was rather thin on the ground.

Not literally, you understand. It would have been very slippery. I mean that access to all things thrillingly and teasingly terrible to my ten-year old mind were restricted. Certainly there was the odd factoid on the back of a Monster Munch packet, the occasional somewhat incongruous Dennis Wheatly novel for sale for 20p from the church fete, and of course the original Top Trumps horror deck where Godzilla is dressed as Mr. Darcy (I’m not kidding; go ask anyone who used to own a pack - and asking is all you’ll be able to do, since they’re now as rare as fair trade cocaine) but that was all, that was your lot sonny, move along now and don’t slouch.

Thank the Dark Lord then that there was at least one place where a salivating young gorehound could turn to get a fix of four-colour fear. And that place was the comics shelf at my unfriendly-neighbourhood newsagent.

Ah, I can see those titles now, their lurid covers tucked away between the more brightly coloured superhero and sci-fi fare (which like any nerd worth his anorak I also dearly loved). They held fascinations that were as yet unmatched by anything on the top shelf.

What titles they had! What blackly shining glories they evoked to my terror-fuelled imagination! What contents they managed to subtly misrepresent!

Let me see now…

There was Tomb of Dracula; even though he never spent any bloody time in his tomb, and so his adventures would have more aptly been called Round the World Package Tour of Dracula. Nevertheless, it was fang-filled fun, and famously introduced the world to Blade the Vampire Hunter, who was then a ski-goggled wooden-sword wielding ex-pat Englishman given to crying things like “Holy Christmas” at the least provocation. A marked difference then to our modern version, who has nothing whatsoever wooden about him (with the obvious and painful exception of his acting) and never mentions any yearly festival at all. This is probably the reason why word has it that original co-creator Gene Colan watched only enough of the first film to see his own name and then walked out. But I digress…
 

Next up was Morbius the Living Vampire, and he did at least do what it said on the tin. That lanky proto-emo was indeed alive, and could even remain so through just about any ordeal of the flesh, including, if memory serves, once being torn into human confetti by a pack of sharks.

And then here was Werewolf by Night. You can guess the content of this one, and if you did, you’d be wrong. For although we were assured that Jack Russell (and he had it coming with a name like that) only did his skinturning at the traditional full moon, it often seemed as if any and every passing piece of shade was enough to do the trick, so that the book may has well been called Werewolf by Cloudy Day or even Werewolf by Wearing Sunglasses.

And yes, yes, I’m aware that these were all Marvel and there were also other comics companies doing their bit for bloodiness, but unfortunately these fine publications weren’t available on the mean streets of High Wycombe at that time, now were they?

What titles I did manage to lay my hands on are now long gone, banished for all eternity to the Phantom Zone of the dustbin by my mother in protest at low-grade literature in general and its effect of the tidiness of my room in particular. But I didn’t care. I’d taken everything I needed from them, the stories weren’t on the pages anymore, they were inside me, growing and changing and remaking themselves anew - and besides by then it was all the more room for the porn.

And I never, ever stopped reading comics. I’m guessing that it was the same for you, and if it isn’t, it’s an affliction that I’ll be pleased to contaminate you with. Just be warned, there’s no known cure. You can only abate the rampaging hunger with fresh devourings of unsuspecting stories. But you must choose your prey carefully.

This is where I, having visited this hideous need upon you, will seek to guide you.

Together we’ll be looking at the whole (ahem) corpus of work in the field, along with its many allied genres, and examine specific titles and trends in detail. And it won’t stop there, my children-in-darkness, for we shall hurtle recklessly back through the history of illustrated tales of terror; back, back through the swirling fogs of yesteryear even unto the Penny Dreadfuls and the Newgate Calendars themselves.

Join me won’t you? I’m not going to hurt you, just love you a little while…

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