This Magazine Is Haunted - The Beyond

The Beyond

Like most other comics of the early fifties, Haunted's content drew upon a wide variety of popular cultural sources, particularly mainstream cinema, pulp fiction and American folklore. Stories were often above average in quality: scripts were literate and occasionally poetic; artwork usually of Fawcett's professional standards (comparable, in a few examples, to EC's more outstanding material). Perhaps the one thing lacking was innovation. Haunted dealt in the standard horror fare of the period - bizarre crimes, weird creatures, walking cadavers and the like. Virtually all of Haunted's recurrent themes were common to the genre, recycled in practically every horror comic to grace the newsstands.

There was one area, however, in which Fawcett showed some degree of originality.

Haunted was notable for employing the "The Beyond," as a unifying element to many of its storylines. While the idea wasn't used consistently, it became a recurring plot device in all of Fawcett's horror titles, sometimes playing an essential role in the narrative. It was, in a sense, the closest thing to a "universe" in a series of books otherwise lacking in continuity.

Briefly speaking, The Beyond was a mysterious plane of existence which occasionally encroached on the physical world. A shadowy limbo vaguely akin to the Afterlife, it served as the source of the many supernatural menaces which threatened the "Realm of the Living." In a number of cases, it was a grey, lifeless purgatory inhabited by rotting corpses; in others, a place of perpetual torment akin to hell (although it was never specifically defined as such).

The Beyond seemed to be the abode of all of humanity's worst fears; vampires, ghosts and demons existed alongside dragons, witches and harpies. All seemed generally hostile towards mankind, some periodically crossed over to prey on selected victims or to seek vengeance on former tormentors. The traffic appeared to flow in both directions; mortals could inadvertently find themselves trapped in the Beyond before the end of their natural lives.

Access to the Beyond took numerous forms. Ghostly express trains made midnight runs to the other side, carrying the spirits of the recently departed. Phantom cruiseliners ferried moldering passengers through the Sea of the Dead. Unwary travellers often found themselves making a one-way trip on the Road to Nowhere. Sometimes, mechanised transport was completely unnecessary - swamps, caves and haunted houses all seemed to lie within the outer boundaries of The Beyond.

Needless to say, the idea wasn't Fawcett's sole provenance; spectral dimensions had been a staple of fantasy magazines such as Weird Tales. Even within the comics industry, earlier publishers had made references to 'The Spirit World,' based on the Judeo-Christian notion of the afterlife. Fawcett's innovation lay in its use of the concept to connect many of Haunted's discontinuous storylines. As a single, underlying premise, The Beyond worked perfectly, providing both an endless reservoir of potential storylines and an explanation as to how supernatural forces could exist in the 'real' world.