Emily Carroll
A comic writer and artist, Carroll has been a seminal name in the world of online horror comics for some time. Her comics are rich in sinister and poetic metaphor, awash in colour and shadow, and are often darkly humorous. They’re the kind of stories that you binge-read before you go to bed because you can’t help yourself, leaving you to watch the shadows at the foot of your bed and try not to panic.
Blood, darkness and gleaming teeth are illustrated in loving and lavish detail, and while the fine points of a scene are often picked out meticulously, the full extent of the horror is often hidden in opulent black. Her first book is titled Through The Woods (US | UK), and each of the five stories is injected with the delicious claustrophobic, asphyxiating quality of the forest at night.
Through the Woods has a lot to say about women, too – there are heroines abound, facing down their demons, failing and succeeding. Her most famous comic, His Face All Red, is an eerie little story about brothers and monsters that makes my stomach clench just writing the title, and you can read it online for free. My favourite, however, is Margot’s Room, which also free to read on her website, and which plays out like a particularly macabre puzzle.
Fiona Staples
Staples is an all-around badass comic artist, but her artwork with dark comic Saga is some of my absolute favourite in the medium. Chances are, if you know comics, you’ll know Saga, which is owned by both Staples herself and the eminent writer Brian K. Vaughn.
Saga has its own problems with sexism to be sure, but often the female leads shine and it’s Staples’ gorgeously rendered and genuinely diverse artistic depictions of women that really seal the deal. Saga’s a dark sci-fi series full of interspecies orgies gone wrong, exploding nurses and people having their heads popped like over-used stress balls, and Staples delivers them all in beautiful tablet-created paintwork, designing every single character, bizarre alien race and piece of technology in the series.
Her artwork has been causing little old ladies to clutch their pearls and fan themselves (probably) since that opening scene in Saga #1, setting the stage for glorious controversy, kick-ass lady bounty hunters and exquisitely depicted gore. Long may it continue.
Chondra Echert
Operating as half of Evil Ink Comics – her co-owner being her husband Claudio Sanchez, frontman of band Coheed and Cambria – Echert’s macabre stories play on how the relationships in your life can bring both horror and salvation.
Her comic, Key of Z, is an excellent start for music lovers and zombie aficionados, but my favourite is her newest release Translucid, a bizarre and illustriously anxious deconstruction of an unhealthy hero/villain relationship. Echert purportedly took the lead with the writing ofTranslucid, and she aces it with trippy villains, love-to-hate anti-heroes and some wonderfully grotesque sound effects.
The horror of the series comes in its psychological fragmentation, the way it pulls you around and pushes you down with the characters in tow. Its angle on domestic abuse, while slightly overdone, is genuinely frightening, and violence is splashed across pages as casually as the image of a boy playing chess in his room. The ending wrings out your mind like a wet sponge and made me scream and throw the book across the room (then scrabble to pick it up, apologising to the cover profusely). Emotional pain has never been so awesome before.
