If you want a visual catalog of horror comics you need to get, Halftone Horrors would fit well on your shelf. Granted, there are apps and websites that can accomplish the same for less money and less weight. But turning the pages on high gloss paper, seeing as many variant covers as author Nathan Hanneman could find, if you’re into horror movie comics, you want this book.
What you likely won’t find in either is a critical examination of said comics. That’s for you to judge. Some cover artwork appears crude, and not just in early efforts. The 90s speculator boom saw a lot of small companies rise and fall with varying levels of quality. You may have never heard of some of them, which says less about the books and more about how you really have to know they exist in order to look for them. Comics shops can only carry so much stock, even in the good times.
Hanneman has gathered an exhaustive list and tried to set boundaries for inclusion. By his own rules, it’s comprehensive but not complete. Also, rules are made to be broken. After stating clearly this covers comics based on horror movies and their associated characters, Hanneman includes both Classics Illustrated and Marvel’s similar efforts to adapt famous horror novels.
The rules stretch a bit to include actor Vincent Price. Dell Comics adapted many of his films in the 1960s, but in the last decade or so Blue Water Comics licensed him as a horror comics anthology host. Though many issues adapt his films again, it still stretches the boundaries.
Boris Karloff doesn’t get a focus, though one could argue what Gold Key published spun off Karloff’s television series, Thriller. There’s no mention of Bela Lugosi’s Tales from the Grave, which regularly featured stories adapted from planned but unmade Lugosi films. (Full disclosure — I did contribute a story to the first issue.) Granted, of the Monsterverse output, that was the only direct connection to horror movies. Hanneman does acknowledges the recent Dracula adaptation from Legendary Comics overseen by Monsterverse’s Kerry Gammill.
Admittedly, Hanneman set himself an impossible task. For the occasional comic you might think deserves inclusion, there have to be at least 50 here you didn’t know about. Possibly because of its accidental public domain status, Night of the Living Dead has had an astounding number of adaptations and continuations. Hanneman gives the sequels their own sections, though George A. Romero’s Marvel work Empire of the Dead is unmentioned. However, because it crossed over with Army of Darkness, there’s a nod to Marvel Zombies.
It’s the kind of book I do like to have on my “coffee table book” shelf, because when I was a kid, a neighbor had a few books on sci fi and horror movies in their living room that kept me occupied on dinner party nights. I like to pay that forward. But Halftone Horrors is for a specific audience, and as it was a Kickstarter campaign from HorrorHound Magazine, might be hard to find. (I’ve seen it in comics shops, and bought my copy at Dark Delicacies in Burbank)
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