Build Your Horror Comics Library With These 13 Favorites From The Fanatical House Of Horrors

Mary Shelly’s classic novel, Frankenstein, has been adapted for visual mediums many times, but few adaptations have looked as striking as the one done in the ‘80s by legendary horror comics artist Bernie Wrightson (Cycle of the Werewolf). In 2012, Wrightson teamed up with writer Steve Niles (October Faction) for a new story featuring his iconic and influential depiction of Frankenstein, which would pick up after the events of Shelley’s seminal horror and science fiction novel.

Unfortunately, Wrightson’s battle with brain cancer kept him from finishing the series. So, he tapped in another acclaimed comics artist, Kelly Jones (Batman & Dracula: Red Rain), to illustrate the final chapter. This volume collects all four issues as well as a gallery of Wrightson’s thumbnails, layouts, and pencils for the fourth issue.

If you’ve only seen director David Slade’s film adaptation of writer Steve Niles (Criminal Macabre) and artist Ben Templesmith’s (Wormwood: Gentlemen Corpse) 30 Days of Night, you owe it to yourself to seek out the original source material that inspired the film.

This volume collects the modern day classic horror comic about vampires laying siege to a snowy town where the sun sets for a full month of darkness. It also collects Niles and Templesmith’s follow-ups to that series, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days, the 2004 30 Days of Night Annual, and 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow, which combine to create an epic saga of visceral vampire action and horror.

The imaginative nature of comics means it can combine two seemingly disparate elements into something exciting that you never knew you needed. In this case, the two contrasting elements are the quaint, anthropomorphic world of Richard Scarry’s Busytown and the bloody violence of Jeff Lindsay’s literary serial killer-turned-TV star, Dexter. 

Film writer/producer (Southbound) turned writer/artist Patrick Horvath expertly blends those elements in this tale of a brown bear named Samantha, who lives and owns a business in a small town. She’s also a serial killer who preys upon residents of a nearby large city. The carefully constructed life she’s built for herself is upended when one of the fellow residents of her community meets a sudden and very violent end.

Just like with film, good gateway horror that fans of all ages can appreciate is something to be treasured; and this original graphic novel from television and comics writer Robbie Thompson (Supernatural) and artist Patricio Delpeche (Catwoman) is a great gateway horror tale.

It follows the exploits of a single dad who’s a minor league hockey player with a secret life as a monster hunter. His life becomes even more difficult when his headstrong daughter discovers his clandestine vocation and wants to join the family business.

The real-world horrors of the titular and colloquial name for Russia’s R504 Kolyama Highway serve as the launching point for this 1950s-set tale by writer Rich Douek (Breath of Shadows) and artist Alex Cormack (The Devil That Wears My Face). It’s called the Road of Bones because it was built by prison laborers from the Kolyma Gulag. It’s believed that the road is paved over the bodies of thousands of these workers who dropped dead, and prison officials deemed burying them in the permafrost of the tundra region impractical.

Douek and Cormack’s tale follows three prisoners who escape from the hellish camp only to enter another nightmare: the vast and desolate arctic region surrounding the prison, where they’ll be forced to ask what they will do and what they must become to survive.

This volume collects the first six issues of writer Joe Hill (Heart Shaped Box) and artist Gabriel Rodriguez's (Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland) comic series , which was later adapted into a Netflix show that lasted three seasons. It tells the story of a grieving family who moves into the New England ancestral home of their deceased father. There, they discover a series of strange keys, each with weird and fantastic abilities that sinister forces are longing to possess.

This collection does a fantastic job of introducing a fun, frightening, and fascinating mythology and secret history that is slowly revealed over the course of the series' six total volumes. Along the way, there are poignant and satisfying character arcs for the book's central cast of young characters and a conclusion that offers plenty of payoff.

Dark Spaces is a horror anthology that delves into different, creepy, titular locales. In this volume, Scott Snyder (Wytches) and artist Hayden Sherman (Absolute Wonder Woman) spin a nightmarish tale of paranoia that begins when a father discovers a dungeon underneath his rural property, filled with torture devices and a warning to tell no one what he has found. It's a discovery that will bring him into the orbit of a mysterious serial torture killer and a Federal Agent who escaped the dungeon as a young boy.

This collected four-issue miniseries is essentially Breaking Bad as an Ozark noir meets The Color Out of Space. It begins with an asteroid crashing into the home of the Damnage brothers; two meth cooks with dreams of escaping their impoverished and lawless rural community. The asteroid ruins their latest batch of drugs that they have to deliver. So, the duo attempts to pawn dust and fragments from the meteor off as a special kind of meth.

What follows is a fever dream of a story that blends noirish crime fiction with nightmare fuel body horror as the Damnage brothers and their clientele imbibe the meteor fragments and mutate into reality-defying monstrosities. The script by Matthew Erman (Terminal Punks) and Lonnie Nadler (Black Stars Above) is great, but the book really is a showcase for the incredible art of Robbi Rodriguez (Spider-Gwen) and the vibrant colors of Marissa Louise (Spell on Wheels).

Ghosts are real, and their ectoplasm is a valuable commodity capable of curing diseases in this collected six-issue miniseries from writer Cavan Scott (Star Wars: Tales From the Nightlands) and artist Nick Brokenshire (The Once and Future Queen). Harvesting that ethereal residue is a potentially fatal endeavor, though. Especially when it coats a massive ship haunted by a multitude of vicious ghosts.

In this story, a shady corporation taps a desperate prisoner and his fellow convicts to harvest a literal ghost ship. What follows is a creepy tale of supernatural horror and bloody violence as the living and the dead search for a way to escape their floating prison.

This horror comedy series from writer Scott Bryan Wilson (Kill More) and artist Liana Kangas (Know Your Station) is about a fast food worker who commits what he believes is the perfect, petty heist only to stumble into a world of sinister cults and demon-summoning supernatural weapons. It's a story of flawed, eclectic characters, some laugh-out-loud funny moments, and some chilling ones that play like a mixture of the TV show Fargo with a satanic horror film. 

This entry in the Dark Spaces anthology from writer Jeremy Lambert (Doom Patrol) and artist Claire Roe (Bury the Lede) combines classic Hollywood glamour with an impoverished working town devastated by tragedy. 

It's set in the 1940s, centered on a fading star named Vivian Drake who's touring the country on a train to boost morale and sell war bonds. When the train pulls into a Pennsylvania town with a collapsing coal mine, Vivian finds herself face-to-face with a sinister entity that the miners found deep in the dark, capable of feasting on and exploiting her pain and regrets.

This series is a great example of the high concept, sweeping scope horror stories that the comics medium is perfect for. Writers Mike Carey (Lucifer) and Arvind Ethan David (a producer on BBC America's adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) and artists Brendan Cahill (The Harcourt Legacy) and Livio Ramondelli (The Kill Lock) take readers to a modern day world where an alliance with demonic forces helped the Allies win World War II. Those demons (known as Shaitan) can exist on Earth if they possess a willing host.

The series follows a British police detective tasked with investigating Shaitan related crime. A sudden attack leaves him bonded with a demon and thrusts him into the shadowy and secretive conflict between two warring Shaitan factions. The series is a blend of mystery, action, alternate history, and body horror, as a demon's human host often acquires monstrous traits after possession.

In this series, actress and writer Hannah Rose May (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Rogues' Gallery) and artist Vanesa Del Rey (The Voice Said Kill) blend a high stakes political thriller with classic possession horror. It's a story of the first female president of the United States who must balance a growing political crisis, being a mother of teenage children, and a battle against a demonic force out to claim her family.

The West Wing meets The Exorcist might seem like an unlikely pairing, but Rose May and Del Rio understood what people love about those properties and combined them into a scary and satisfying horror comic.