Book Review: Horror and Comics

reviewed by Elizabeth Brown, Assistant Teaching Professor, and Cody Parish, Program Director, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round, eds. 2025. Horror and Comics. Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2025. 296 pp. US $75.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:  978-1-8377-2255-6. https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/horror-and-comics-round-et-al/

         Far more complex than its title suggests, Horror and Comics delivers an array of original essays on the global genre of horror comics. This collection, as the editors make clear in their introduction, seeks to move existing scholarly conversations beyond specific comic publishers, individual creators, finite historical periods, and bias toward popular Western comics. Instead, it includes essays organized into three parts, each composed of four chapters, that carve out space to introduce new questions around the themes and rhetoric of the medium, yet refrain from creating an exhaustive anthology of all global horror comics.

Part one presents essays that examine the fluidity of horror comics and the ways in which they both draw from, and influence comics of other genres. Distinguished by its visual essay format, Elizabeth Allyn Woock’s opening chapter analyzes the thematic evolutions found in comic adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Woock’s essay privileges readers’ multimodal knowledge of comic convention to depict its argument in an exciting example of form following function--a scholarly comic about comics! It is worth noting, however, that the use of Chiller font for the lettering makes the text inaccessible. The second section of the collection consists of essays that examine representations of Othered identities in horror comics--including women, queer folks, and black, Latinx, and rural communities--for the ways in which they are rendered monstrous and for how these marginalized characters, at times, regain agency through their monstrosity. Of note is Keiko Miyajima’s chapter on Ito Junji’s Tomie. Miyajima interrogates the ways in which Ito utilizes “aspect-to-aspect” visual presentation to position the female gaze as a disruptive force to the male gaze and reframe the abject monstrous-feminine of the Japanese bishōjo as desirable. The final part of Horror and Comics features cultural-historical readings of horror texts depicting national anxieties, with Christy Tidwell’s chapter providing a rich, nuanced critique of Slow Death Funnies, that, at once, praises the comic as a subversive example of 1970s’ American ecohorror, while simultaneously critiquing it for its “sexism, ableism and ecofascism” (p. 297).

Horror and Comics boasts rich analyses brimming with historical depth on comics from Italy, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and the United States, including comics published between the 1600s and 2021. Beyond traditional horror comics and graphic novels, the contributors consider Italian fumetti neri, or black comics; Japanese manga; documentary/nonfiction comics; and underground comix. However, the texts examined only partially meet the editors’ goal of expanding existing discussions of horror comics to a global stage:  just five of the twelve chapters focus on non-English language comics, whereas analyses of more comics from the global south would enhance the volume. Materially, the use of visuals is inconsistent throughout the volume, with some chapters featuring copious reproductions and others none at all--possibly pointing to the complexities of licensing rights in a project with as ambitious a scope as this one. Moreover, the comics reproductions themselves appear inconsistent, as pages of Tomie in the original Japanese used in Miyajima’s chapter, for example, show up in poor resolution should the reader magnify the screen to try to read them. Triebel and Vanderbeke reference and reproduce 16^th-Century German woodcuts, but their horizontal orientation clashes with the page format of the volume. There is also inconsistency in the editing and individual organization of the essays. The texts lack abstracts and writers’ theses occasionally lacked development or were buried within their writing, making this text less accessible to new scholars. With its varied themes and approaches to scholarship, Horror and Comics is, first and foremost, for rhetorical scholars of horror as a genre, with secondary overlap into the study of comics as a medium.

  Table of Contents

Introduction – Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round

PART ONE: Crossing Genres, Blurring Boundaries
Multimodal Mirroring in ‘The Black Cat’ – Elizabeth Allyn Woock
Satanic Feminism and Decadent Aesthetics in Guido Crepax’s ‘Valentina’ Comics – Miranda Corcoran
The Living, the Dead and the Living Dead: Brazilian Horror Imagery and Genre Hybridisation in Shiko‘s Três Buracos – Tiago José Lemos I Monteiro and Heitor Da Luz Silva
Befriending the Past: The Genre-Bending Vanessa Comics Series (1982–1990) and its Historical Context – Barbara M. Eggert

PART TWO: Identity, Agency, Humanity
‘I’m not who he thinks I am’: Identity and Victimhood in Country Horror Comics – Matthew Costello
‘What’s one more monster?’: Articulations of Latinx Monstrosity and Whiteness in Border Town – Anna Marta Marini
‘Still pretty, ain’t she?’: The Female Gaze and the Queer Monstrous Feminine in Itō Junji’s Tomie – Keiko Miyajima
Sinister Houses and Forbidden Loves: Queer Identity in DC’s Gothic Romances – Lillian Hochwender

PART THREE: Society, Anxiety, Politics
Abjection, Ambivalence and the Abyss in EC’s New Trend Line – Alex Link
The Power of a Demon and the Heart of a Human: The Darkness of Humanity in Devilman – Meriel Dhanowa
Comics and the Horrors of Reality – Dirk Vanderbeke and Doreen Triebel
‘REALITY scarier than any boogeyman’: Shock, Exploitation, and Environmentalism in Slow Death Funnies – Christy Tidwell
Afterwords – Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round 

Book Review: Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined

 reviewed by Dominick Grace

Kees de Groot, ed. Comics, Culture, and Religion:  Faith Imagined. New York:  Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 264 pp. US $39.95 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-3503-2162-5. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/comics-culture-and-religion-9781350321588/ (open access - free download)

 Comics, Culture, and Religion:  Faith Imagined, edited by Kees de Groot, adds to the growing list of books addressing religion in comics (2024 also, see Grafius and Morehead’s Horror Comics and Religion). The book also participates in the growing trend towards globalism in comics scholarship. While American texts, such as Maus, Watchmen, and Craig Thompson’s Habibi, are addressed, the book also covers European, Japanese, and Indian texts, and others on religions other than Christianity. These features are all to the good. While not every chapter, perhaps, will be of use to every reader, anyone interested in the range of comics with religious elements, and/or the relationship between comics and religion per se, will find material of interest here, and scholars interested in the specific topics of individual chapters will wish to check those ones out, at least. The scholars, whose work appears here, are mostly European, so though the lens through which most look is Western, it is not, with a couple of exceptions, North American. This is also all to the good. Diversity of topics and of scholarly voices remain important to the growth and robustness of scholarship generally, and comics scholarship specifically, given that comics are a worldwide phenomenon, but comics scholarship has not, as yet, fully encompassed that global reality.

Nevertheless, this collection is a mixed bag. The chapters are all in English, but many of the authors are not native speakers, so the prose can be stilted and occasionally, grammatically flawed. This might seem like a niggle, but careful editorial oversight should have been able to smooth out such infelicities without compromising the authors’ voices. Furthermore, the scholars included are not, generally, comics scholars per se, but rather religious studies scholars, who do bring an important perspective to a book on comics and religion, but who also do not always have the depth of comics knowledge or focus on comics-specific aspects of what they discuss that comics scholars may be looking for. The books’ approach is also oriented more towards social science than humanities, which is hardly a limitation or flaw, but it does mean that comics scholars more on the humanities side of the discipline may find this book less useful than will their social sciences colleagues. (Full disclosure:  I come from the humanities, so the methodologies and interests of some of these papers fall outside my own areas of practice, interest, and knowledge.)

The book is divided into four parts. As de Groot writes in his introduction:

 

The first part, Comics in Religion, starts with religions. How do religious communities and institutions use comics to communicate with their audience and why and when do they protest against them? The second part, Religion in Comics, starts with comics. How are religious beliefs, rituals, symbols, leaders, stories, and practices represented, criticized, and discussed in comics? The third part, Comics as Religion?, discusses the cultural role of comics in cultivating a sense of the sacred and making meaning (7-8). Part four, Learning from Comics, asks, “What and how do comics teach about culture, about religion, and about the intertwinement of the religious and the social?” (8).

 

The quality of the essays varies considerably. Some are well written and researched, and clearly argued; others fail on one or more of these fronts. Many of the essays also don’t seem to me to end up having much of use to say. For instance, Paula Niechcial’s “The Reception of Comics on Zoroastrianism” sounded like it would offer a useful exploration of quite an esoteric (to me) topic. However, her quantitative study of the reception of two comics had very low responses--in the case of one of the comics she was asking about, only one of her 91 respondents indicated being familiar with it. Consequently, it is difficult to reach reliable conclusions about responses to these comics, based on this research. Others drift from the book’s focus. For instance, the one on “The Magic of the Multiverse:  Easter Eggs, Superhuman Beings, and Metamodernism in Marvel’s Story Worlds,” by Sissel Undheim, has much more to say about film and TV than the comics--and there is much one might discuss about how Marvel Comics have treated (or mistreated) religion. Line Reichelt Føreland’s “Comics and Religious Studies:  Amar Chitra Katha as an Educational Comic Series” offers useful information on comics as educational tools and on the history of the comics she is discussing, but does not really answer her opening question:  “How can comics be used in religious studies?” (205; my emphasis). What would have seemed to me obvious examples to consider of comics that try to proselytize--Spire comics, Jack Chick tracts, for instance--are not even mentioned.

On the other hand, several pieces are strong, whether on comics familiar to North American readers. For instance, in “Implicit Religion and Trauma Narratives in Maus and Watchmen,” Ilaria Biano’s exercise in “framing Maus and Watchmen in the context of the implicit religiosity of their traumatic narratives” (141) offers useful insights into these canonical comics in their cultural context. Evelina Lundmark tackles the weaponizing of online outrage to attack comics that don’t conform to a particular religious orthodoxy in “Cancelling the Second Coming:  Manufactured Christian Outrage Online,” offering valuable insights. Irene Trysnes provides what is, for an outsider, an excellent analysis of the use of religion in Norwegian comics, in “From Subordinates to Superheroes? Comics in Christian Magazines for Children and Youth in Norway.” Christoffe Monotte takes a new look at Eisner’s A Contract With God in terms of “sociology of religion and migration sociology” (222), in “A Contract with God or a Social Contract?” Other papers were on Preacher, on Craig Thompson’s Habibi, junrei manga, the comics of Kaisa and Christoffer Leka, and other topics.

The final words of the conclusion are, “To be continued.” This is a fair conclusion. This volume is to be commended for its exploration of a diverse array of comics through a religious studies lens, but it also leaves room for additional work. The exploration of religion and/in comics does indeed need to be continued further than it goes here.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Comics and Religion in Liquid Modernity, Kees de Groot (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
Part I: Comics in Religion
1. From Subordinates to Superheroes? Comics in Christian Magazines for Children and Youth in Norway, Irene Trysnes (University of Agder, Norway)
2. Cancelling the Second Coming: Manufactured Christian Outrage Online, Evelina Lundmark (Uppsala University, Sweden)
3. The Reception of Comics on Zoroastrianism, Paulina Niechcial (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
Part II: Religion in comics
4. Drawn into Krishna: Autobiography and Lived Religion in the Comics of Kaisa and Christoffer Leka, Andreas Häger and Ralf Kauranen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
5. What Would Preacher Do? Tactics of Blasphemy in the Strategies of Satire and Parody, Michael J. Prince (University of Agder, Noway)
6. Islam and Anxieties of Liberalism in Craig Thompson's Habibi, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (Reed College, USA)
Part III: Comics as Religion?
7. Implicit Religion and Trauma Narratives in Maus and Watchmen, Ilaria Biano (Istituto Italiano, Italy)
8. Manga Pilgrimages: Visualizing the Sacred / Sacralizing the Visual in Japanese Junrei, Mark MacWilliams (St. Lawrence University, USA)
9. Comics and Meaning Making: Adult Comic Book Readers on What, Why and How They Read, Sofia Sjö (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
Part IV: Learning From Comics
9. The Magic of the Multiverse. Easter Eggs, Superhuman Beings and Metamodernism in Marvel's Story Worlds, Sissel Undheim (University of Bergen, Norway)
10. Comics and Religious Studies: Amar Chitra Katha as an Educational Comic Series, Line Reichelt Føreland (University of Agder, Norway)
11. A Contract with God or a Social Contract? Christophe Monnot (University of Strasbourg, France)
Conclusion: Comics as a Way of Doing, Encountering, and Making Religion, Kees de Groot (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
Bibliography
Index

 

 

Book Review: Chinese Animation. Volume 1: Religion, Philosophy and Aesthetics

 

 reviewed by John A. Lent, editor and publisher, International Journal of Comic Art

 

Thomas Paul Thesen. Chinese Animation. Volume 1:  Religion, Philosophy and Aesthetics. Ahrensburg:  Thesensches Offizin, tredition GmbH, 2025. 822 pp. ISBN:  978-3-00-080811-1. https://www.chinese-animation.com/

      Thomas Paul Thesen’s Chinese Animation. Volume 1:  Religion, Philosophy and Aesthetics is worthy of the accolade, plentifulness--with 822 pages; 41 pages of references to works in Chinese and English; an index of about 820 characters tied to religion, film, animation, philosophy, and other areas; 1,301 information footnotes, and access to 143 landscape paintings, Chinese ink-wash, and other types of animation films, available through a digital version of figures. An added technical bonus is that the book is designed as reader-friendly with a larger type font, double-spacing, sturdy paper, and names of works in both English and Mandarin, and Chinese individuals’ names in the Latin alphabet, Chinese characters, and Pin’yin spelling.

Thesen is very up front when discussing how he went about putting the book together, stating that his not knowing Mandarin “can be rather sensitive as the texts permit various interpretations, which, of course, will steer away from the original meaning of the often ancient texts”; that his efforts to keep the philosophical and religious concepts” understandable, “rendered many of them superficial and often lacking depth,” and that his knowingly making broad statements “not necessarily accurate in all their details” was again meant to be understood by the layman, avoiding the complexities of some concepts in their original wording.

What the reader must be aware of, besides Thesen’s scholarly integrity, is that he has succeeded in transforming much theoretical, philosophical, and technical wording into highly-readable text, and has utilized the services of six Chinese translators to ensure accurate language, all of whom he lists on the imprint page--Ho Dan’yuan, Wang Lexie, Lee Hui En, Chan Yen Ly, Chan Ying Xuan, and Wu Zhi Yun.

In this masterfully-crafted volume, Thesen meticulously explains China’s major teachings (Confucianism, Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, and folk religion), as well as “The Six Principles of Painting” (spirit-harmony-life-motion, bone manner by use of the brush, conformity with objects in portraying forms, follow characteristics in applying color, plan-design the place-position, and transmit-propagate models by sketching), laid down by Qi and Liang dynasties painter Xie He (active, ca. 500-535), and the additional aesthetic principles (naturalness and regularity, openness and suggestiveness, emptiness and substance, blandness, perspective and depth, and realism). In each instance, the author enlightens the reader with information about the evolution of these teachings and principles, as well as paintings and animated films related to them.

All of this background leads up to the main thrust of Chinese Animation…, the unique traditional Chinese ink-wash painting, and its spinoff to animation. Thesen spends considerable wordage on landscape painting as the cradle of ink-wash art, beginning with Six Dynasties (220-589) artist and musician Zong Bing’s initial description of landscape painting, through the Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279), Ming (1368-1644), and Qing (1644-1911/12) dynasties, going into detail about various painters’ lives and their works and some animated films that appeared later.

China’s major contribution to world animation, ink-wash, constitutes the fourth, and last part of the book, analyzing the country’s ten examples--“Where Is Mama?” (1960), “Little Swallow” (1960), “The Cowherd’s Flute” (1963), “The Deer’s Bell” (1982), “Feelings of Mountains and Waters” (1988), “The Foolish Scholar Shopping For Shoes” (1979), “Squirrel Barber” (1983), “Jia Er Sells Apricots” (1984), “36 Chinese Characters” (1984), and “Lanhua’hua” (1989). Normally, “Where Is Mama?” “The Cowherd’s Flute,” “The Deer’s Bell,” and “Feelings of Mountains and Waters” are designated as the only ink-wash productions; Thesen’s inclusion of six shorter works adds to future research possibilities.

To satisfy this reviewer’s futile attempt to find a shortcoming of Thesen’s work, perhaps, if he had interviewed ink-wash animators during his decades of research, their views would have added more authority to his findings. However, to overload him with this task, would be like having a railway maintenance worker of old, who had just put in a full day tamping ties and laying rails, then proceed to the coal mine to start his ten-hour shift. A bit exaggerated, but you get the point. Thesen does include quoted material of animators, such as Duan Xiaoxuan and Te Wei, gathered by other scholars.

Chinese Animation. Volume 1:  Religion, Philosophy and Aesthetics is a one-of-a-kind trough of facts, theories and concepts, history, and viewpoints on Chinese landscape painting, ink-wash and other animation forms, and the teachings and principles endemic to China and its art, all tied together, free of academese, presented in a flowing style, abounding in fascinating side stories, rigorously researched, and scrupulously analyzed. It is a “must” for university libraries and researchers and students serious about animation as a field of study, and a “highly-recommended” for those fascinated by Chinese culture.