Horror comics

Horror comics are comic books, graphic novels, black-and-white comics magazines, and manga focusing on horror fiction. In the US market, horror comic books reached a peak in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, when concern over content and the imposition of the self-censorship Comics Code Authority contributed to the demise of many titles and the toning down of others. Black-and-white horror-comics magazines, which did not fall under the Code, flourished from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s from a variety of publishers. Mainstream American color comic books experienced a horror resurgence in the 1970s, following a loosening of the Code. While the genre has had greater and lesser periods of popularity, it occupies a firm niche in comics as of the 2010s. Precursors to horror comics include detective and crime comics that incorporated horror motifs into their graphics, and early superhero stories that sometimes included the likes of ghouls and vampires. Individual horror stories appeared as early as 1940. The first dedicated horror comic books appear to be Gilberton Publications' Classic Comics #13 (August 1943), with its full-length adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Avon Publications' anthology Eerie #1 (January 1947), the first horror comic with original content. The first horror-comics series is the anthology Adventures into the Unknown, premiering in 1948 from American Comics Group, initially under the imprint B&I Publishing. 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 subgenre "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.