Horror Comics - Precursors

Precursors

The horror tradition in sequential-art narrative traces back to at least the 12th-century Heian period Japanese scroll "Gaki Zoshi", or the scroll of hungry ghosts (紙本著色餓鬼草紙) and the 16th-century Mixtec codices.

In the early 20th century, pulp magazines developed the horror sub-genre "weird menace", which featured sadistic villains and graphic scenes of torture and brutality. The first such title, Popular Publications' Dime Mystery, began as a straight crime fiction magazine but evolved by 1933 under the influence of Grand Guignol theater. Other publishers eventually joined in, though Popular dominated the field of with Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales. While most weird-menace stories were resolved with rational explanations, some involved the supernatural.

After the fledgling medium of comic books became established by the late 1930s, horror-fiction elements began appearing in superhero stories, with vampires, misshapen creatures, mad scientists and other tropes that bore the influence of 1930s' Universal horror films and other sources. By the mid-1940s, some detective and crime comics had incorporated horror motifs such as spiders and eyeballs into their graphics, and occasionally featured stories adapted from the literary horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe or other writers, or stories from the pulps and radio programs. The single-issue Harvey Comics anthologies Front Page Comic Book (1945), bearing a cover with a knife-wielding, skeletal ghoul, and Strange Story (July 1946), introduced writer-artist Bob Powell's character the Man in Black, an early comic-book example of the type of omniscient-observer host used in such contemporary supernatural and suspense radio dramas as Inner Sanctum, Suspense and The Whistler.

As cultural historian David Hajdu notes, comic-book horror

...had its roots in the pulps, where narratives of young women assaulted by 'weird menaces' ... had filled magazines such as Terror Tales and Horror Stories for years. Variations on gothic fright had also appeared in several comics — Suspense Comics (which began in 1943), Yellowjacket (which included eight horror stories, billed as 'Tales of Terror,' in its run of ten issues, beginning in 1944), and Eerie (which had one issue published in 1947).