Pickman’s Ashcan Issue
Horror in Art from Bosch to Giger
(Oh, and probably incorporating Creepy and Swamp Thing)

Campfire stories shouldn’t contain alien syllables that drive their listeners insane. Or that’s what the prosecutors are saying. I say to hell with them (A sentiment that will appear awfully prescient, I suspect, when I incorporate some of the same extra-terrestrial phonemes into my defense in court).

But enough about that.

In my first ever column for Camp Horror, I confessed to being terrified (like a little girl) by a picture in a book. I don’t know if you recall the particular column, I’m referring to here. And the story’s a little too long to re-recount, so if you’re interested you could always check it out in the back issue vaults of this unhallowed mag. We can meet back here when you’re done. It’s important background, and I need to make myself a cup of tea.

Back already? Are you sure you went and looked? Okay, I’ll believe you. Just this once.

Well, I was thirteen-ish when I met that book again at least in an un-bubblegummed state, and our paths crossed once more in the modern library space of Hinchingbrooke School. I was checking out some books from the school library when I spotted the spine of that same damned book leering at me from a shelf.

My hand was trembling as I pulled the volume down, and the muscle-memory of my fingers located the place where that terrible picture lurked with alarming accuracy. The book fell open. The picture was there, intact, uncensored by an infant’s Bazooka Joe gum or parental scissors. The grim reaper stared up at me, a picture whose sheer horror had been multiplied by six or seven years of expectation, during which time that ghastly visage had haunted dreams and waking hours.

And?

I laughed.

It was a terrible drawing. I mean really bad. In the continuum of horrific art, it probably ranks somewhere just below the bad guy out of the Smurfs. The crude pen and ink drawing had been, I guess, a kind of Rorschach test that my brother and I had projected our own fears onto. Alone, in daylight, it sucked.

The weird thing is, though, that since that day when the biggest bogeyman of my childhood was revealed as an inept scribble, I have hunted for the same feeling it had given me before; the unbridled terror and hysteria that had sent crashing through my embryonic imagination.

It gave me an interest in the art of the horrible, an interest that abides to this very day.

A little later in my life I saw Hieronymous Bosch’s 15th Century masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights. Naturally, I found my attention dragged to the third section of that triptych, the Hell bit and I rediscovered some of that fear I felt all those years before. Here, within a work of beauty and surreal composition, was a world of darkness and illogic; where giant knives with ears strode the landscape and a man screamed out from within the tight confines of a solitary drum; where people passed through hourglasses into stygian pits and dogs feasted on the entrails of the living.

Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, a 16th Century work very much in the spirit of Bosch’s nightmare vision, is like a still frame from the best damned horror movie you never saw. Okay, Romero’s dead were cool, but the raw terror of the massacre of people by an army of skeletons that Bruegel offered us makes the zombie movie seem reasonably comforting by comparison. The brutality is unrelenting; I think I found one oasis of calm-two lovers playing musical instruments while the skeletons destroy everything else. But even this has a sinister undercurrent, for a skeleton is playing a really weird instrument behind them, subverting their melody with, one guesses, the kind of music that would have flowed from Erich Zann’s violin in the story by Lovecraft, while all around is pure carnage.

The reason I mention these two medieval paintings is that I found the artworks demanded that I formulate a narrative with which to comprehend the images I was viewing. That what we are looking at when we see these crazed religious visions from a long-distant past are perhaps the distant forbearers of horror comic books.

Because horror comic books have always flipped me out. I remember that one of the pivotal moments in my development, as a horror writer wasn’t Dracula, Frankenstein, or Night of the Living Dead. It was a tattered old Warren comic I picked up at a jumble sale when I was twelve or so, an issue of Creepy. It raised the damned bar on everything I had thought the genre was capable of.

The story that blew the top of my pre-teen head off was called, and I kid you not, Orem ain’t got no Head Cheese. Backwoods cannibals were picking off hikers, dragging them back to their cabin, and cutting them up for cordon bleuuurrrgh cooking. The problems began when Orem, the dad of this anti-Walton family, splits the head of one of the latest catch only to find a tumor spoiling his ’head-cheese’. In disgust, Orem tosses the offending brain into the pit with all the rest of the inedibles. The tumor quickly organizes all the squidgy, nasty body parts the family found too gross to eat into a rudimentary body for itself and then goes searching for revenge. Heh heh heh heh.

Okay, it isn’t the most elegant or sophisticated plot line you’re ever going to see. But the art for the story pulled no punches; it shoved your face into a pile of giblets and forced you to keep it there until the story was done. The hick girl who feels the thing creeping up her body when she’s laying in her bed and mistakes it as foreplay from one of the other savages, only to pull back the covers and see, well, that crawling over her, left me breathless with horror. And the scenes showing the family’s food preparation techniques can still raise a shudder when recalled.

From that day on, I was a big fan of horror comics. Seduction of the Innocent? Nah, the pictures just tripped me out. Okay, maybe the stories were a little simplistic and relied on a suspension of disbelief that was, for many, untenable; but there was a glee and Luckily I was present when horror comics grew up, in the pages of the legendary Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing in the 80s. Suddenly all the arguments I had heard against the kind of entertainment I loved; gratuitous violence, poor scripting, infantile plotting, simplistic art were summarily dismissed. Here was a book that was beautifully written, intricately illustrated (mostly by Bissette and Totleben), and that was bloody damned scary to boot. I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t just horror comics that grew up the day The Anatomy Lesson was published.

Of course, I had read the Wein/Wrightson books, and I had been buying the new run of Swamp Thing largely because of their tremendous groundwork, but The Anatomy Lesson and the stories that followed it, are a high-water mark in the history of horror comics. When Abigail Cable tries to clean herself with a brush to the point of leaving droplets of blood on the bristles (and I think we all know what part of herself she was cleaning however much we might like to think we don’t), still remains for me one of the most poignant and hard-hitting images from the whole damned genre, be it comic book, literature or film.

Horrors in comics were no longer paper tigers like that pitiful illustration in that damned book that had scared me so but disappointed me more they were as capable of delivering a visceral punch to the system as any medium out there.

Art has always delighted in the horrible, the terrible, the unsettling. You only have to look at the bestial face of Saturn as he devours his children in the famous (black) painting by Goya. Or the dwarf-like presence and the eerie horse that haunt the woman’s dream in Fuseli’s The Nightmare; Munch’s Scream, the disquietening cityscape of Di Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street or Giger’s biomechanical alternate realities to see that.

Horror comics, I strongly believe, are just a part of a tradition that was implicit in the first two paintings that I referred to in this column; giving the horrors of the human mind a graphical representation within a narrative form. Through them, we can gauge our reactions to our own fears, suddenly torn free from our minds and splashed across page or canvass.

I am reminded of a quotation from Lovecraft, about that great patron saint of horror art, Richard Upton Pickman:

"(A)ny magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scary or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear."

The physiology of fear, my favorite subject, and obviously at the very root of my love for horror in
pictorial art.

Now go, I got a defense to prepare.