Greetings ghosts and ghoulies and welcome to The Theatre of Terror the home of horror comic news, reviews, classic comic scans and creepy art from around the world. Just remember, it's not for the nervous!
Viper Comics is proud to announce its Digital 1st comic series which is being launched today, “Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter”. Get your digital copy for only .99 cents at Graphicly, iVerse, Comixology, iBooks and Amazon.
The series launched with the release of Issue #1 in March. Issue #2 followed on April 18th. Issue #3 is released on May 16 and Issue #4 releases on June 13. The trade comes out on July 11th. Just in time for Comic-Con 2012.
Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter
Written by Russell Nohelty | Art by Renzo Podesta
Ichabod Jones is a deranged, mentally unstable psychopath. He’s also on a mission to save the world. At least that’s what the bossy voice in his head tells him. The same voice that led him to be interred in a maximum security mental asylum in the first place. Now, he must escape from the asylum and rid the world of monsters in the midst of the Apocalypse. Of course he’s a psychopath, so who knows if anything going on in his head is real in the first place.
I love comic book trailers, take a look at this one below.
Tales of Voodoo ran for 36 issues, between 1968-1974, and was a part of Eerie Publications. Tales of Voodoo produced some wonderful covers from the likes of Bill Alexander, Oscar Novelle, Carl Burgos and Chic Stone. Take a look at the gallery below.
Back from the Depths and The Theatre of Terror are delighted to announce a new member of the team for 2012.
Starting this week, Decapitated Dan, aka Dan Royer, the horror comic journalist, blogger, podcaster, and THE head of horror heads, will be providing horror comic reviews and news here on this site!
Dan is a horror comic journalist living in Illinois. He has been covering horror comics since 2009. He hosts two podcasts; Discussions with Decapitated Dan and Tales From the Water Cooler. Dan is also the founder of Dan Con, a local comic book convention in Chicago, IL. He is also the founder of the Ghastly Awards, awards that honor excellence in horror comics.
We’d like to welcome Dan to the team and we hope you’ll enjoy his horror comic reviews as much as we do.
A few months ago I received Damaged Goods in the post. Normally I’d complain to the Post Office (hahahaha) but on this occasion it was a rather sinister looking graphic novel, and the pages within were anything but normal!
Writer, Richard McAuliffe, and artist, Mark Chilcott have crafted 128 pages of disturbing and morally questionable, extreme horror stories that will burrow in to your brain and mess around with the sanity settings in your head. The creative team seems to be in sync, both a little deranged but on the same wave length, and it shows, as the stories and art compliment each other well.
McAuliffe leaves no stones unturned and no boundaries uncrossed in his writing, delivering disgusting scenes of murder and mutilation and then following up with a psychological scare that often requires an instant re-read just to make sure your eyes weren’t deceiving you the first time. It’s interesting stuff and manages to keep you entertained all the way through.
Chilcott is also on top form. Horror stories can lose a lot of their punch if the art fails to deliver an horrific image that disturbs the reader. Not the case with this book. When called upon, Mark delivers the creepy in abundance, drawing some great expressions on the faces of both victims and psycho murderers alike. There’s also a variation in style that keeps the whole thing fresh.
Standout moments of this GN happen when the line between reader and participant is broken. On several occasions you’re dragged unwillingly in to the stories, made to feel more like a dirty voyeur, than just a comic book fan. It’s a powerful way of bringing the audience closer to the creators. It also means you can’t complain about the filthy crimes within the book, or tut at the authors for their twisted minds. You’re a part of this debauchery for wanting to read it in the first place.
You can purchase Damaged Goods via the Markosia website.
Fantastic mash-up here from artist Murray Groat, with his reimagining of Herge’s Tintin, as he takes on the many unspeakable horrors of H.P. Lovecraft. Would love to read these beauties for real but unfortunately they’re just covers. Damn fine cover all the same.
Check out the gallery below.
You can see more of his stuff here. You can’t buy copies of the pics, so don’t even ask.
Not the after affect of a heavy night on the pop, the Bloody Mary Illusion is an old urban legend and fun-time party game played at sleepovers around the world. There are many variations of the story but the general gist involves staring in to a mirror and repeating the name “Bloody Mary” somewhere between 3 and 14 times. (Think of it as an old school version of The Candy Man.) Other methods include chanting more than three times, chanting at midnight, spinning around, rubbing one’s eyes, running the water, or chanting her name thirteen times with a lit candle. In some versions of the legend, the summoner must say, “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.”
It is said that if Bloody Mary is summoned, she would proceed to kill the summoner in an extremely violent way, such as ripping the face off, scratching the eyes out, cutting the head off, driving them insane, dragging them into the mirror with her or causing serious injury or death. Alternatively, if she doesn’t kill the one who summoned her then she will haunt them for the rest of their life.
While this urban myth is just a bit of fun, and ideal for proving how brave you are in front of college girls wearing nothing but tight t-shirts and knickers, there lurks a small element of truth in the story! Stare in to a mirror, and after a short time, you will begin to see an unfamilar face staring back. Go on try it. I dare you!
A recent report from the Department of Psychology at the University of Urbino has just published a paper on this optical illusion. Giovanni B Caputo’s Strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion study asked 50 unsuspecting volunteers to stare in to a mirror for 10 minutes. When questioned after many of the test subjects reported seeing…
huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; an unknown person (28%); an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).
However, the paper also found:
…the frequent apparition of fantastical and monstrous beings, and of animal faces cannot, in our opinion, be explained by any actual theory of face processing. Neither constructive approaches nor top down accounts seem to provide adequate explanations.
it continues…
The participants reported that apparition of new faces in the mirror caused sensations of otherness when the new face appeared to be that of another, unknown person or strange `other’ looking at him/her from within or beyond the mirror. All fifty participants experienced some form of this dissociative identity effect.
Spooky, huh?
Did you try it yourself? If you did, you will likely have experienced one of the strange visions listed above. This, sadly, has nothing to do with the supernatural. Caputo attributes these visions as a variation on something known as the Troxler Effect. Discovered by Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, back in 1804, it is part of the general principle in sensory systems that an unvarying stimulus soon disappears from our awareness. In otherwords, if you stare at something for long enough, your brain gets bored and begins to fill in the information for you. Have a look at the image below or visit Moillusions for more optical illusions.
Regardless of the cause, these illusions can be pretty creepy. If you want to give yourself a scare this Halloween, you can try it out and see for yourself. The best method is to use a 25 watt incandescent light, placed behind you so that you can’t see the light directly or it’s reflection, and five to ten minutes of staring at yourself in the mirror (from about 1.5 – 2 feet away). The low-level lighting that makes colour perception difficult and should increase the likelyhood of a trippy visual.
Bloody Mary Recipe
A quick recipe to mix one up and try it for yourself. Add dashes of Worcestershire Sauce, Tabasco, salt and pepper into highball glass, then pour all ingredients into highball with ice cubes. Stir gently. Garnish with celery stalk and lemon wedge (optional). Served On the rocks; poured over ice.
Ingredients:
45ml (3 parts) Vodka
90ml (6 parts) Tomato juice
15ml (1 part) Lemon juice
Drink 13 of these and we guarantee you’ll be seeing all sorts of weird!
The German horror comic series Gespenster Geschichten (Ghost Stories) appeared from March 1974 to March 2006 pumping out a massive 1654 spooky stories, making it one of the most successful comic book series in Germany.
Big thanks to the always wonderful Monster Brains website for these wunderbar scans.
Do you want to join the Scream team? We're looking for enthusiastic people to contribute articles on horror or comics here on The Theatre of Terror. Contact me for more info.
Back from the Depths and The Theatre of Terror are delighted to announce a new member of the team for 2012. 
A few months ago I received Damaged Goods in the post. Normally I’d complain to the Post Office (hahahaha) but on this occasion it was a rather sinister looking graphic novel, and the pages within were anything but normal!
Fantastic mash-up here from artist Murray Groat, with his reimagining of Herge’s Tintin, as he takes on the many unspeakable horrors of H.P. Lovecraft. Would love to read these beauties for real but unfortunately they’re just covers. Damn fine cover all the same.
Not the after affect of a heavy night on the pop, the Bloody Mary Illusion is an old urban legend and fun-time party game played at sleepovers around the world. There are many variations of the story but the general gist involves staring in to a mirror and repeating the name “Bloody Mary” somewhere between 3 and 14 times. (Think of it as an old school version of The Candy Man.) Other methods include chanting more than three times, chanting at midnight, spinning around, rubbing one’s eyes, running the water, or chanting her name thirteen times with a lit candle. In some versions of the legend, the summoner must say, “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.” 
Bloody Mary Recipe
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