I recently purchased The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, a collection of horror comics spanning the era before and after the Comics Code Authority was instated in 1954. Though I enjoy comics (as a kid I had a pretty good collection), I've kind of fallen out of sync with the comics world. I have friends and family who occasionally direct something fantastic my way, and I'm really interested in the medium, but this collection was the first comic material that I've purchased in about ten years (although I recently enjoyed and can highly recommend Jason Shiga's online stuff, particularly Meanwhile, Fleep, and Bookhunter). I decided to pick up the Mammoth Book because I also just bought The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America and I wanted to do some brushing up on the works that caused the Comics Code Authority to be created in the first place. I think that the fear and uncomfortableness that the older generation sometimes feels about video games today very much mirrors the way that horror comics were viewed in the 1950s, so in the interest in understanding the present better, this stuff seems like pertinent knowledge. I guess some people on Amazon were disappointed that The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics isn't a full-color reproduction, but for $12 I can't complain. The collection is filled with mostly obscure horror comics--48 in all--published between 1944 and 2004. About half of the comics are from the '40s and '50s, which is good because frankly, many of the later works are pretty dull. Nothing in the Mammoth Book is famous; there are no prints of well-known EC comics like Tales from the Crypt. I think that the book is a collection of whatever random works that the publishers were able to obtain the rights to for little or no cost; those looking for a collection of the most famous (and most controversial) horror comics from the last half-century will be disappointed. Each comic is introduced by the book's editor, Peter Normanton, and describes the authors of the comic and the era in which it was published. Though Normanton clearly knows his stuff, his command of the English language is tenuous at best; after a couple of really annoyingly bad introductions, I skipped the rest and just stuck to the comics. Despite its faults, the Mammoth Book does contain some really good comics. It's fascinating to see the dramatic change in style and approach before and after the Comics Code; in some cases, the censorship seems to have actually improved the writing because authors were forced to use suggestion rather than all-out gore. The Monster of Dead End, which was published in 1962, is an excellent example of effective comic horror that doesn't rely on melting faces or decapitations to get its point across. I also found it interesting that the tone of the earlier comics is much more depressing; though evil-doers often get what is coming to them, the endings of many of the 1950s era works are not uplifting or satisfying. The later books tend to play up the "you will reap what you have sown" approach to storytelling, where everything works itself out because all of the bad people have died and all of the good people have triumphed, but before the Comics Code Authority things didn't always end quite so neatly. Though more recent tales like Over His Head (1983) began to experiment again with rather unpredictable stories, the dramatic difference between the 1950s and 1960s comics is really interesting. So, while this is hardly a collection of the "best" horror comics, or even the most well-known horror comics, I enjoyed most of The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics. If you skip the introductions and stick to the comics and I think that collection is a really interesting example of how the medium progressed in terms of story telling technique and art style in the face of cultural fear and censorship. It's hardly a definitive work, but as a (rather random) sampling of horror comics from the last fifty years, it's not half-bad.

Holy crap this has been a crazy month! First a bunch of stuff happened at work, then I got on some planes and flew around the country, then I came back and got in my car and drove all over Northern California, then I moved all of my belongings to a new place, and now I am getting ready for a trip to Japan. All of this has occurred within a 3 week span, and I'm exhausted!

Not exhausted enough to stop thinking about horror games, however. It seems that the database is in dire need of attention. It is missing a crapload of new games like F.E.A.R. and The Darkness, as well as old standards that really should be added (yeah, yeah, Dino Crisis, I know). It also contains a bunch of games that have been cancelled or otherwise changed since I added them. I hope to revamp the contents of the database again soon to bring it up to date.

This site has also been the target of a couple of very annoying spam bots. I've made it a little more difficult to post on this site: you now need to prove that you are not a robot by entering some text in the post dialog. It's a simple solution and seems pretty effective.

So, in leu of any real horror game material at the moment, I'm going to instead recommend to you a few books that I have enjoyed recently. 999 is one of the best horror short-story collections I have ever read. I particularly liked the Gene Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oats stories, but there are a large number of other gems as well. I am also right in the middle of The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, which has served as a great introduction to this author. I've not read Lovecraft much before, and reading his works now is interesting because it is clear that he has had a significant influence on modern American horror. The stories all follow a similar pattern and the mechanics of each tale seem almost cliché, but I think that they feel that way because his works have been copied so much since they were written, not because they were cliché when they were written. Finally, though not strictly a horror film, Paprika is the best animated movie I have seen in a very long time. It is sort of an anime version of postmodern Japanese surrealism--think Haruki Murakami.

What have you been reading/playing/watching?

I've finally posted a new feature, Chris' Guide to Understanding Japanese Horror. This article is a detailed look at Japanese horror within the context of Japanese culture. I attempt to explain how horror from Japan works on a very general level, and how the mechanics of Japanese and American horror differ. Here's an excerpt: The underlying concept behind Japanese yuurei is onnen (), the idea that some emotions are so strong that their power can extend from beyond the grave. Almost all classic and contemporary ghost stories from Japan operate on onnen: in addition to the obvious case of Okiku, witness Sadako's character in The Ring, the antagonist in Juon, or even the explanations given for Hanako's origin in the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story. Onnen is the central concept behind yuurei, and as we will see, it differentiates Japanese horror from works in the West pretty dramatically. I spent quite a while on this one, so please check it out.

While this is slightly off topic, I thought I'd point out the Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. I saw this in a bookstore over the weekend and thought it was pretty funny. The author makes no attempt at levity, however; his delivery of various zombie disposal methods, the origins of the zombie virus, and confirmed sightings is utterly serious. The author bio says something like, "Max Brooks lives in New York, but is ready to move to a more defensible position at a moments notice."

I've been thinking a bit lately about what horror games might learn from horror literature. How might we make a game that conveys uneasiness as well as Stephen King's 1408? The Silent Hill series seems to have a bit in common with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, but Murakami's works are much more complicated and disturbing.

It seems to me that the main challenge in creating a literate horror game would be to get past the cheesiness of killing zombies. Games must require the player to do something, but it seems like reverting to tried-and-true "destroy and progress" mechanics breaks the suspension of disbelief. Eternal Darkness used the idea of insanity to help unsettle the player, but at times it came off as gimmicky. The Clocktower Series might be a step in the right direction: by removing all forms of combat (and selecting an obviously vulnerable main character), the developers have increased tension significantly. Is such a drastic move necessary to avoid cheesiness? Good horror literature makes the reader question their own confidence in the nature of reality... how might a horror game do the same?