Junji Ito: The Master of Horror Manga

Welcome to the last week of 2018's Month of Horror. It is surprising that horror isn't a particularly large genre in comic books; at the start of the month we looked at why there aren't many American horror comics which you can read about here. Likewise, in manga we see a fairly large gap in the horror genre and most of the notable examples of horror manga aren't particularly horrifying for want of a better word; the excellent Tokyo Ghoul is classed as a horror manga but it is a tenuous classification at best. As many anime series, and movies, are manga adaptations this has a knock on effect that few truly horror anime exist - some like Monster and Mononoke exist and I would consider them some of my favourite anime. However, there is one manga artist and writer who has truly mastered the horror genre: Junji Ito. Very few pieces of media actually makes me feel scared - Junji Ito manages to do that every time. His manga truly captures the essence of horror taking the ordinary and mundane, or things too bizarre to take seriously, and make them terrifying; as a result many of the adaptations of his work has failed to illicit the same instances of terror that his manga does. I will also recommend not reading ahead if you're easily disturbed - I am showing some panels from Ito's work and they can get quite disturbing.

Junji Ito and Horror

Ito's manga doesn't contain things we generally find scary. We don't see vampires and zombies as in Western media or yōkai and oni from Japanese media. Instead Ito uses distortions and things impossible to describe in his manga - Ito himself best describes his style of horror saying 'It's interesting to take things and look at them from a backwards perspective.' As a result Ito can make things as mundane as cats, children playing, and a group of people sitting at a table seem unnerving. Turning the absurd and mundane into something unnerving is how Ito creates his horror. One of his main inspirations is H.P. Lovecraft who also uses the absurd to make horror. Like with Lovecraft when reading one of Ito's manga you get the impression of an immense sense of dread looming over you. Ito utilises the medium to its full advantage. For one, Ito hand draws his manga so, instead of getting a glossy finish that we get in say a Western comic we don't get that with him. His illustrations often are sharply done with dark colours making them well-drawn but not easy to look at. This helps add to their unnerving quality. In some horror manga, including Elfen Lied, the art style changes slightly when we get to the horror elements by becoming less refined, but in Ito's the art style never changes. We get a continued unnerving art style building up tension continuously. It is very much like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Both films are not nearly as gory or visibly violent compared to sequels, remakes, and other horror movies but they earned they were better at creating horror. Made on small budgets in the desert they are not aesthetically pleasing movies which added to the brutal and rustic feel of them. Although Ito's work is not low budget it has the same effect - dark and sinister this creates horror. As mentioned earlier there's a tension building up when reading Ito and he always makes this pay off. Before we see a horrifying image we see a character's reaction to it at the bottom of the page and as you turn the page we see the image very clearly. Below we have an example of this from My Dear Ancestors. The story revolves around a young woman meeting her boyfriend's family for the first time and she is greeted by this...

One first glance you can't tell what it is. How can you? Ito takes something ordinary and distorts it beyond recognition. You have to look at it longer to understand what it is; like in this case it's not a centipede attached to his head but rather a series of skulls. Ito very rarely explains the origins of the monstrosities of his stories; you get glimpses into what they are but no clear explanation. Thanks to this even absurd ideas become terrifying, like a shark walking on spider legs...

Tomie, Uzumaki and Gyo

Now we'll look at three of Ito's most famous works. The most famous is Tomie which at the time of writing has nine live-action movies and two OVAs in the Junji Ito Collection. First appearing in 1987 this manga tells the story of a young and mysterious woman called Tomie Kawakami who has a manipulative personality. Her body is found mutilated and dismembered after vanishing following a school trip but she turns up the next day as if nothing happened sending her classmates into a state of panic. As people are treating her different she said bye to her best friend, Reiko, and jumped off a bridge. We find out through flashback that on the trip up a mountain her boyfriend, Yamamoto, found her having an affair with their teacher. Suddenly driven to a homicidal rage he pushed her and she fell off the mountain dying. The rest of the class, bar Reiko, loathed Tomie so convinced the pair not to go to the police - instead they opted to dismember her and each take a body part to dispose of. As Tomie's only friend Reiko had to dispose of Tomie's heart. When the class found out that after Tomie's second apparent death Yamamoto and the teacher wanted to go to the police so the class decided to take the pair out. However, Tomie turned up. At the end of the manga we find out that Yamamoto is now insane, and the rest of the class has either dropped out of school or commit suicide. Finally around Tomie's heart a new version is growing. Across the Tomie series (it stopped publishing in 2000) we find out more and more about her but not enough to truly understand her. All we know that she is an immortal being who is a manipulator and enjoys tormenting people who are driven to homicidal or suicidal tendencies. 

The next manga we're looking at is Uzumaki. First appearing in 1998 it has received a film adaptation and two video games. Like most of Ito's work it is a weird story with very disturbing imagery. Uzumaki tells the story of the town of Kurōzu-cho (Black Vortex Town) which has a curse revolving around spirals. People start becoming obsessed, or paranoid, by spirals until they in turn start becoming spirals. People's bodies start distorting into the shape of spirals, others begin turning into human-snail hybrids, and people's hair also start becoming spirals. One of the two protagonists, Kirie, has her hair become spirals and when she tries to cut it off it goes to strangle her. A freak storm wipes out most of the town leaving behind several abandoned terrace houses which the town moves into. Due to overcrowding the town expands building more houses, in a layout of a spiral. As the manga progresses the town becomes increasingly enveloped by spirals and the protagonists realise that even time is caught up in the curse...

Finally, we have Gyo which received an unintentionally hilarious anime adaptation in 2012. A young couple, Tadashi and Kaori, are visiting Okinawa when they encounter a strange, decaying fish walking on mechanical legs. This especially disturbs Kaori due to her having a hyper-sensitive sense of smell. Okinawa is then swarmed by various sea creatures on these legs including a great white shark. They return to Tokyo with the first fish, which Tadashi managed to bag, where they give it to his uncle, a scientist called Dr. Koyanagi, to analyse. However, Tokyo is soon also attacked by the fish and Koyanagi had to cut off his arm after the machine carrying the fish detached from it, and then attached to his arm. We actually get the origins of the fish as well: a virus producing a horrible stench was developed by the Imperial Army as a last ditch attempt to fight the war but the plane carrying it was shot down into the Pacific. Kadashi's father had built the machines, which pumps the virus into the victim, so it could walk and infect enemy soldiers. They soon found out that the virus does in fact affect humans when Kaori gets infected and starts becoming increasingly deformed.

Other Stories

Junji Ito has written many stories so I'll quickly go over three which I found particularly disturbing which you might find interesting.

The Enigma of Amigara Fault

This was a story included as a bonus with Gyo. Like most of his stories it has a strange premise with frightening results. An earthquake leaving a fault in the side of a mountain range full of holes shaped like people. Several hikers become obsessed in finding their holes, and when they do they strip to their underwear to enter it. Other hikers have nightmares of those who had ventured into the mountain being still alive and in agony. At the end a second fault is found with holes in distorted shapes, and something coming through...

The Hanging Balloons

Again, another strange but disturbing premise. A famous celebrity is found hanging from a metal noose from a telegraph pole and her fans blame her boyfriend for nagging her about her career. Soon enough her fans kill themselves in the same way after supposedly seeing a balloon shaped like her head. Soon enough her boyfriend sees a balloon, climbs a tree, and hangs himself when told to do so. Her best friend, Kazuko, tries to tell people about the balloon and no one believes her until more balloons arrive. Each are shaped like someone and has a noose for a string which it aims to hang the person whom it resembles. Soon the rest of Tokyo is attacked by the hanging balloons and Kazuko's family soon are claimed one by one.

Army of One

Now we have Army of One which I consider to be the most disturbing story by Junji Ito. The story revolves around a hikikomori (a shut-in) called Michio is invited to a coming of age party for all the people in his old middle school now turning 20. Meanwhile, in the local park a couple is found dead and stitched together. Planes start dropping pamphlets advertising people to join the 'Army of One' which people connect to the murders. More and more people turn up stitched together and on Christmas Eve, when the Army's song is played on the radio, causing hundreds to be found stitched together; everyone killed was found distorted and strewn across Christmas decorations. Despite warnings the ceremony happens resulting everyone who attended to be found killed and stitched together. More and more people soon are found stitched together, and Michio realises that soon he might be as well. I found this one to be the most disturbing just because of how horrific and gruesome the images of the people stitched together are. It is truly one of the most disturbing panels in a manga that I've ever seen.

Conclusion

Junji Ito is truly a master of horror and should be considered alongside figures such as Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. Bold, unflinching and unpleasant each manga creates a tense and unnerving read. Even when he was commissioned to draw two Pokemon, Bannette and Gengar, he still made them incredibly disturbing. Skip the adaptations and go straight to the source material. Live-action and anime have, so far, failed to capture the intensity of Ito's work. The Tomie movies average out to 5/10 stars on IMDB, The Junji Ito Collection according to critics was a poor attempt to replicate Ito, and when Gyo was shown at my university's Anime society Halloween event it was widely mocked. That's because Ito's stories can only really be done by Ito and they are so wedded to manga as a medium. For true horror go to Junji Ito.

Thank you for reading and I hope you found this post, as well as 2018's Month of Horror, interesting. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby. In the UK it's Black History Month so every day in October we're looking at a person, event, or movement from black history so be sure to check that out. Thanks for reading.

Sawney Bean

A depiction of Sawney Bean

Welcome back to 2018's 'Month of Horror' and this week we're focusing on a particularly gruesome tale from Scotland. When we think of Scotland and monsters you most likely will instantly think of the Loch Ness Monster, or if you're wanting a lesser known monster you could mention the Stronsay Beast from Orkney. However, there is one infamous tale of a more human monster which haunted Scotland centuries ago: Sawney Bean and his Clan. Hiding in a coastal cave in Ayrshire on Scotland's west coast Sawney Bean was the patriarch of a clan made out of his own incestuous offspring who would ambush travellers in order to eat them. Today we're looking at the truth and fiction behind one of Edinburgh's most gruesome tales.

The Tale of Sawney Bean

Alexander Beane, later nicknamed Sawney Bean, was born in East Lothian sometime in the 1500s. His father was a ditch-digger and a hedge trimmer but the young Sawney was not one for an honest day's work and soon ran away for a life of crime. He soon met a woman accused of witchcraft called 'Black' Agnes Douglas and they began what would become 25 years of crime and murder. They settled in a coastal cave between Girvan and Ballantrae on the west coast where they began their murders. Together they had fourteen children who in turn would breed with one another constantly expanding the Bean family until they had a 'clan' of 45 incestuous children and grandchildren. Today the west coast is very beautiful but can be fairly remote in certain areas and this was even more the case in the sixteenth century, and bearing in mind the only light you would have at night would be any lanterns that you brought with you. So, at night, the Beans would creep from their cave and attack unsuspecting travellers. They would rob them of their possessions, murder them, and then take the corpses back to the cave where they would be consumed by the cannibal family. The locals noticed that people were vanishing at night but they could not find the culprits. Almost a thousand people were consumed by the family over 25 years. A couple one night were heading away from a fayre when they were ambushed. Unknown to the Beans the husband knew how to fight and managed to save himself; his unfortunate wife was murdered by the Beans. The cannibals fled when the scuffle was heard by over fayre-goers who arrived on the scene to help. This would be the beginning of the end for the Beans.

Realising that the Beans were responsible for the vanishings and body parts appearing on the shore a message for help was sent to King James in Edinburgh. Apparently personally leading a party of 400 soldiers and bloodhounds the king's party descended onto the cave. Inside the cave was a scene of pure horror. Blood was everywhere, body parts hung from hooks or were pickled in jars, and the possessions of the murdered were scattered in piles across the cave. Actually facing a foe which can fight back the Beans surrendered without much of a fight and were dragged to Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh. They were either taken to Leith or Glasgow where they were executed without trial. The men had their genitals, hands, and feet cut off, and were then left to bleed to death. Apparently Sawney himself shouted in his final breath 'it isn't over, it will never be over.' Meanwhile, the women and children were forced to watch the men die and were then burnt at the stake. According to Girvan folklore one of Bean's daughters managed to get away and settled in the town planting a tree. Her identity was eventually found and lynched from her tree. 

However, we have to remember one thing. Sawney Bean may not have ever existed...

Stories of Sawney

A copy of The Newgate Calendar from 1863

Scottish folklorists have debated where the story of Sawney Bean originated. One publication which specifically mentions Bean by name is The Newgate Calendar which was a publication featuring biographies of famous criminals, like highwayman Dick Turpin, lists of executions, and stories of criminals. It primarily published in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries with it getting a penny dreadful version in the 1860s. However, the Calendar is thought to possibly have popularised Bean's story. The Lives and Actions of of the most Famous Highwaymen was written by a 'Captain Charles Johnson' was printed in London in 1734, and later Birmingham in 1742. Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell argue that this is where the story originated. It has even been hypothesised that famous writer Daniel Dafoe was 'Johnson' and therefore created Swaney. Several chapbooks detailing the story appeared throughout the late-eighteenth century across the country. However, it took until 1843 for a specifically Scottish version of Sawney to arrive in John Nicholson's Historical and Traditional Tales...Associated with the South of Scotland. Furthermore, there are no reports or records of a cannibal family being captured and executed during the 1500s around the local area, Edinburgh, Glasgow or Leith. This brings us to another point: there are too many contradictions for it to be true. The Bean family was supposedly executed in three places and notice in the previous paragraph I mentioned that King James went to catch Sawney - Scotland had seven kings called James. Most versions state that either James I or James VI led the campaign against Sawney. The issue is James VI was born 129 years after James I died. However, Sawney wasn't entirely fictitious...

Stories are like ideas where they are an amalgamation of people's own ideas, past stories, and even real life. For example, some historians have argued that the Greek gods were real kings and queens who got mythologised and deified over the centuries. Local Galloway folklore may have contributed to the myth of Sawney Bean, especially as Galloway is close to Ayrshire. Another cannibal from folklore predating Sawney may have aided in the the creation of him. In the fourteenth century during a famine there was supposedly a company led by a former butcher from Perth called Christie-Cleek. When one of the company died Christie cooked him and the rest of the company developed a taste for human flesh. Under Christie, like Sawney, they attacked travellers to eat them until taken down by the army - except Christie escaped and re-entered society. Due to the similarities between the stories it is possible that there were cases of cannibalism sometime in Scotland's past. An English chapbook (magazine) called The History of John Gregg and his family of Robbers and Murderers predates the stories of Sawney, although no date is given, and tells the tale of John Gregg in Devonshire who lived in a cave with his incestuous, cannibalistic family of robbers. Hobbs and Cornwell have hypothesised that Johnson may have adapted the story of John Gregg and shifted in to Scotland as Devon was less 'mysterious' compared to Scotland. As multiple of these stories exist there is a chance that they had some grounding in reality. It is unlikely that huge cannibal families roamed the Scottish Highlands or English coast but it times of famine bandits may have resorted to eating their victims.

Why?

The big question now is why make up the story of Sawney Bean. Well that is easy - to have an interesting story. Humans throughout history have a tendency of making morbid and gruesome stories, hence why horror exists as a genre. What makes a better way to scare Georgian readers than a tale of a cannibal family lurking in the night in rural Scotland? There is an interesting debate about the story of Sawney Bean which explains why certain details of the story happen the way they did. In 1745 claimants to the British throne invaded and launched a rebellion in the '45 Jacobite Uprising. Jacobitism occurred across the British Isles but was particularly strong in Scotland for various reasons. With the defeat of the Uprising the British government intended to make sure that the core support of Scottish Jacobitism, the Highland clans, was crushed. Gallic, bagpipes and kilts were banned; the Highland Clearance Acts commit ethnic cleansing against the Highlanders by moving them from their ancestral lands; and roads were built to aid military manoeuvres were just some of the policies implemented. Across England anti-Scottish attitudes, and in the Scottish Lowlands anti-Highlands attitudes, were widespread. This continued until the Highlands were romanticised by Scottish intellectuals, like in Walter Scott's Waverley, and aspects of Scottish culture, like kilts, were brought back. Incidentally, items associated with the Highlands became synonymous with Scotland as a whole. Sean Thomas has downplayed the anti-Scottish and anti-Jacobite attitudes in the tale of Sawney Bean but when we look at it this gets contested.

A depiction of the Battle of Cullodon from the 1745 Jacobite Uprising - anti-Jacobitism fed into the tale of Sawney Bean

Sawney Bean wasn't specifically made to be anti-Scottish, however, by moving the story of John Gregg to Scotland it fed into anti-Scottish attitudes. 'Sawney' was often used as an insult to Scots, he had a 'clan' like the Highlanders; his wife was possibly named after Agnes Randolph who resisted English attacks on Dunbar during the Wars of Independence; and Scotland was a land of 'mystery' to many English so it made more sense to them for a cannibal family to exist there. There is a chance that the stories having James VI lead the attack may be part of this. James VI was a devout Protestant, in fact he was Scotland's first Protestant monarch, so it may possibly be signifying 'heroic' and 'civilised' Protestants fighting 'backward' and 'sinful' Catholics. Many Highland clans were Catholic so joined the Catholic Jacobites against the Protestant parliament. Sawney's execution, and that of his family, resemble the execution for treason - hung, drawn and quartering for men and burning for women. Thomas has argued that as The Newgate Calendar also featured English criminals it couldn't therefore be anti-Scottish. However, this leaves out many key points. For one, it regularly portrayed certain crimes, enemies of the British crown, Catholics and others who didn't fit in with elite society - which included the Scots and Highlanders - very negatively. Also, Dick Turpin was featured in The Newgate Calendar and he has been heavily romanticised, something Sawney never got. England got a swashbuckling highwayman while Scotland got a clan of incestuous cannibals. Nevertheless, the anti-Scottish aspect of Sawney Bean was soon flipped on its head...

Legacy

1977's The Hills have Eyes was strongly inspired by Sawney Bean

Sawney Bean has become a major part of Scottish folklore and tourism since the late-1800s. Scottish writers adapted the tale of Sawney Bean and made it something to be proud of. One key example of this was S.R. Crockett's The Grey Man (1896) which featured Sawney as a character. The part of Sawney Bean's story where he lives in a cave at Bennane Head came from Crockett; before Bean was seen as living in a coastal cave somewhere else. This story appealed to Scotland's tourist industry and storytellers, and it allowed Scotland to reclaim Sawney Bean. I live in Edinburgh and have been on several horror tours and attractions. Many feature the tale of Sawney Bean. There are a series of dark humoured, semi-educational history themed horror attractions called The Dungeons; most are in the UK but there are ones in Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, and San Francisco. There is one in Edinburgh which features many parts of Edinburgh's bloody history including rooms based on the murderers Burke and Hare; the infamous Scottish witch trials; and a torture chamber. The Edinburgh Dungeon has a short boat ride and a room all based on Sawney Bean. Of course the Loch Ness Monster takes up most of Edinburgh's 'horror' quota but Sawney Bean is always in the background for tourists, and locals, who want more gruesome tales. Also, the story of Sawney Bean has actually inspired movies. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre takes inspiration from serial killer Ed Gein but it has been hypothesised that Sawney Bean may have had some input. The film revolves around an insane and cannibalistic family. One film was very specifically based off of Sawney Bean: Wes Craven's The Hills have Eyes. Set in the New Mexico desert it follows a family stalked, tortured, murdered and eaten by a cannibalistic family led by a patriarchal figure. The manga and anime Attack on Titan, where a beleaguered humanity is being whittled down by Titans who eat humans, also features two Titans named 'Sawney' and 'Bean'. It is likely that Sawney Bean's story will continue to horrify people for years to come.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, 'Sawney Bean, the Scottish Cannibal', Folklore, 108, (1997), 49-54

-Craig Jackson, 'The Grisly Deeds of Alexander Bean', BBC, bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/sawney_bean.shtml, 30/03/2011, [Accessed 18/10/2018]

-Sean Thomas, 'In Search of Sawney Bean', ForteanTimes, web.archive.org/web/20080519171404/http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/129/in_search_of_sawney_bean.html, 04/2005, [Accessed 18/10/2018]

Thank you for reading. Next week will be the last week of 2018's Month of Horror. Check out our Facebook for future updates, and everyday this month we'll be briefly looking at something from black history as in the UK it is Black History Month. For other blog updates catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Children: The Most disturbing Painting?

Saturn Devouring his Son

Welcome to the second week of 2018's Month of Horror and for the first time we're entering the world of art. Throughout history there have been many unnerving and horrifying paintings, such as Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare depicting a demonic creature sitting on a woman's chest as she dreams or Théodore Géricault's Anatomical Pieces which depicts human body parts in vivid detail. However, there is one painting which is seen as being universally horrifying. Two years ago I was on a trip with my university's history society and with a group of friends the topic of art came up, and one of us brought up that she had seen a painting which really unnerved her. Everyone else started talking about how we all had at one point seen a painting and felt uneasy, until we realised that we all were talking about the same painting: Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son. It is truly an unsettling painting and I would recommend looking at an enlarged version just to see how vivid it is. 

Saturn

Saturn is a being from Roman and Greek mythology and for the rest of this section I will go by his Greek name, Cronus. He was the son of the sky, Uranus, and the earth, Gaia, but was cast into a Hell-like world named Tartarus with his siblings. Angered, Gaia created a scythe to get her children to overthrow Uranus and Cronus decided to do so. He lay hidden and castrated his father replacing him, and as he was overthrown Uranus cursed Cronus and his siblings to forever be Titans. Cronus cast his other siblings, the Cyclopes and Hundred-Handed Giants, into Tartarus and ruled as king with his sister, Rhea, as queen (incest was common in Greek myths). However, Cronus learnt of a prophesy that one day he too would be cast down by his son so whenever Rhea gave birth he ate the infant whole. All except the sixth child. Rhea swapped the baby with a stone whom Cronus proceeded to eat, and she then hid the child on Mount Ida. The child was Zeus and when he grew up Gaia gave him a method to make Cronus sick, and he did vomiting up the stone, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Hestia, and Demeter. With their help he released the Giants and Cyclopes from Tartarus who forged Zeus' thunderbolts, Poseidon's trident, and Hades' helmet of darkness. Zeus, his siblings, the Cyclopes and Giants overthrew the Titans and imprisoned them; some in unique ways. Atlas was forced to forever hold up the sky; Prometheus was tied to a rock for everyday an eagle to disembowel him; and Cronus' fate changes upon telling but most have him imprisoned somewhere. The story of Saturn/Cronus is an interesting one so it is natural that it has been told many different ways - in some Cronus is an almost benevolent figure who after he was overthrown becomes king of Elysium (an afterlife reserved for Gods and heroes). One of the most famous depictions is by Rubens, which may have inspired Goya's version. Cronus seems to be sucking the life out of his child in a quite aggressive way, you can see the terror on the child's face, but it cannot hold a candle to Goya's painting in terms of horror.

Rubens' Saturn

Francisco Goya

Vicente López Portaña's portrait of Goya, c.1826

Who is the man who painted one of the most terrifying painting? Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was a Romantic painter during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Born in 1746 to a modest family he became a painter and eventually became a painter for the Spanish court in 1786. In 1789 he was made the official court painter. His paintings of this era were very much in line with most Romantic artists, albeit court painters were painting monarchs, the royal family, and aristocrats so doing anything too out-of-line was fairly rare. Instead painters would put hidden symbolism in the painting which any eagle-eyed observer who understood the symbolism would understand. Like many educated individuals of the time he was seen as being a man of the Enlightenment believing in increased rights for the slowly emerging bourgeoisie. Luckily for Goya the Spanish monarchs were willing to make reforms liberalising Spain - Charles III, who hired him in 1786, has been seen as a typical, and popular, reformist monarch. Then in 1789 the French Revolution broke out over a desire for reform and bread inspired by Enlightenment values, which you can read about here. The cultural elite of Europe, including figures like William Wordsworth, welcomed the revolution until it became increasingly radical by 1793. Europe's states started declaring war on Revolutionary France, including Spain, in an attempt to halt the revolution. At the same time Goya contracted a mysterious illness, lead poisoning and Ménière's disease have both been suggested, which started making him lose his hearing which in turn may have caused his mental breakdown. His paintings became increasingly pessimistic and a series called Los Caprichos showed this pessimism towards Spanish society. Painted between 1797 and 1798 it showed what Goya saw as persistent barbarity, superstition, and a decline in rationality present in Spanish society. A good example of this is The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters shown below.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos

The years 1808-1814 were bad for Goya. The death of Josefa, his wife, in 1812 hit him hard and he had to face a serious political issue. Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and installed his brother on the Spanish throne; Goya had to balance being a court painter for the French monarchy and his own neutrality. Napoleon's war in Spain was particularly brutal. The fighting was continuous, guerrilla war was actually coined to describe the fighting, and French soldiers were willing to brutally massacre rebellious towns, 2,000 were killed at Tarragona alone. Normally, depictions of war highlighted the nobility or martyrdom of those who had been fighting, for a good example of this there is the 1770 depiction of James Wolfe's death during the Seven Years' War. Negative depictions of war did happen, like the 1631 depiction of the Siege of Magdeburg, but glamorising war was a lot more common. Goya did not so war positively. Painted in 1814, although started around the time of Josefa's death, were The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 brutally show the harshness of war - Third shows civilians lining up against a wall waiting to be shot. In 1812 a Spanish court in Cadiz released the most liberal constitution of its time which was repealed when the Spanish king, Ferdinand, was restored dashing Goya's hopes of a bright future. This brings us to the Black Paintings.

El Tres de Mayo 1808

Alienated by the repeal of the Constitution of 1812 feeling that Spain was returning to a Medieval world, and alone with his hearing vanishing and mental health declining Goya retreated from the world. He bought a house on the outskirts of Madrid called La Quinta del Sordo, The Villa of the Deaf, where he lived for three years from 1819. He painted fourteen paintings directly onto the plaster of his house. All were dark, sinister, and showed an insight into the mind of a broken and alienated man. They became known as the Black Paintings. He did not tell anybody about them, did not write about them, and they only saw public light 50 years after he died. They were just for Goya. In 1824 Goya would move from Madrid to Bordeaux, possibly starting a relationship with his maid Leocardia Weiss, until his death in 1828. Meanwhile, the Black Paintings would remain in his villa until being moved to the Museo del Prado, Madrid in 1874 including one which was painted onto the plaster of his dining room, Saturn Devouring his Children...

One of the Black Paintings: Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat) depicting Satan and witches

The Painting

Painted in a dining room we have one of history's most horrific paintings. Normally the Greco-Roman Gods were portrayed in idealised terms - even Rubens portrayed Saturn as a strong, muscular being. Goya did not. Instead we have a Saturn squat, skinny, and hiding in the darkness with a crazed look on his face. His mouth is just a black maw, and his eyes are wide and hysterical. Saturn isn't an idealised but malevolent being but rather a rabid animal. How he's eating his child is also very disturbing. Most myths had Saturn/Cronus eating his children whole whereas Rubens portrayed him as sucking the life out of the child. Instead Goya had him tearing apart the child. One arm has been torn off, the head has been eaten, and the other arm is about to be bitten off at the elbow. All this is accompanied by very obvious blood. If you look carefully you can see that Saturn isn't just holding the partially eaten corpse - his fingers are literally digging into the spine of the child. This brings us to another point: the child is older. In the myths Cronus ate his children as newborns and the child in Rubens' painting is still very young. Goya's victim seems to be fairly large and the YouTube video linked at the bottom suggests that this gives an image that the victim knew its devourer. We see a background in Rubens, we just get a dark mass in Goya's painting. The version we're seeing is actually a less visceral version of Goya's painting. Years of neglect in the villa weathered all the Black Paintings and the transfer to the museum caused damage so we're actually seeing a less horrific version of the painting. Apparently in the undamaged painting it was strongly implied that Saturn was deriving sexual satisfaction from consuming his victim as Karen Morden and Stephen Pulimood have suggested that remains of a partially-erect penis can be seen. Although Rubens' portrays Saturn a cold killer Goya portrays him as a rabid, mad animal.

There have been many interpretations of the painting. Only one of Goya's six children survived so it has been suggested that this was a way to explore his relationship with his son; another interpretation is that he was exploring the relationship with Leocardia as she was possibly his mistress; a third has suggested that it was a comment on youth, age and how time consumes all. Political allegory has also been suggested. Saturn serves as the Spanish crown rabidly consuming the 1812 Constitution and the Spanish people who are represented by the victim. Goya, as mentioned, lived through the French Revolution and I have seen one interpretation that this was an allegory to the French Revolution. The Reign of Terror saw many early French revolutionaries sent to the guillotine until the ones who started the Terror, including Robespierre, went sent to it themselves. Goya may be making a comment that like Saturn the revolution consumed its own. As he never intended it for public view, or apparently kept notes on the Black Paintings, we do not know what Goya intended when he painted it.

From the depths of isolation we now have a visceral painting which leaves the observer struck with unease and horror. The sources I have used are as follows:

-Evan Connell, Francisco Goya: A Life, (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2004)

-'The Black Paintings: Saturn', http://eeweems.com/goya/saturn.html, 2006, [Accessed 12/10/2018]

-James Voorhies, 'Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment', https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/goya/hd_goya.htm, [Accessed 12/10/2018]

-Nerdwriter1, 'The Most Disturbing Painting', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g15-lvmIrcg&index=30&t=0s&list=LLH1rGhuPAiCD64J8Zojyncw, 1 March 2018, [Accessed 12/10/2018]

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. All this month we'll be looking at horror related items for 2018's Month of Horror. It is Black History Month in the UK and everyday for October on our Facebook we're briefly discussing historical events, movements and people related to black history. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

The Horror Comics of the 1940s and 1950s

It is now October and longtime readers of this blog will know that every October I do the 'Month of Horror' where each blog post we look at something terrifying. To start 2018's Month of Horror I'd thought it would be interesting to look at a forgotten part of comic book history. By the end of the 1940s most superhero comics had gone into decline with only really Batman, Superman and Captain Marvel (now called Shazam) surviving until their return in the second half of the 1950s. In that time comic companies experimented with a range of genres including Western, romance, and, most importantly, horror. You don't see many comics truly in the horror genre. We have some notable ones including Scott Snyder's Wytches and the manga by Junji Ito but considering the size of the medium horror comics are a bit underrepresented. However, this wasn't always the case. During the late-1940s and 1950s there was a plethora of surprisingly graphic horror comics and today we're looking at them.

The Rise of Horror

Eerie #1

Superheroes were incredibly popular during the Second World War - readers saw the daring exploits of the comic book heroes and made a link to wartime propaganda. Soldiers were represented as heroes fighting for, (in the words of Superman comics), 'truth, freedom and the American way' so readers read the comics and imagined their friends and relatives doing the same. However, when the war ended so did the love for superheroes with the exception of a few like Captain Marvel and Batman. The end of the War did not bring an end to global issues making readers lose faith in glossy heroes, and returning veterans wanted something different. For several years they had been exposed to stories filled with sex and violence which made them want more which superhero comics, aimed at a younger audience, didn't offer. Avon Periodicals answered the call with a one-shot comic in January 1947 called Eerie (pictured above). The cover would create a stereotype for horror and comics for years to come which showed inspiration from the Universal horror movies like Dracula and The Bride of Frankenstein: a scantily clad, slim, voluptuous, bounded young woman was looking fearful in ruins as a vampire resembling Count Orlok from Nosferatu leering over her. Inside were stories of terror including a man being haunted by the ghost of a tiger and another of an island infested with carnivorous lizards. It was tame and even had some humour in it; a story of a man haunted by his wife was called 'The Strange Case of Henpecked Henry' and there was a two-paged story featuring a comical ghost. Nevertheless, it started a trend and a year later the first ongoing horror comic began with Adventures into the Unknown by American Comics Group. The first issue adapted Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto as well as other stories; the first two issues featured stories of werewolves, killer puppets and ghosts. This began a trend which other companies decided to emulate, including Marvel...

Marvel's Dabble with Horror

At this stage I'm using Marvel, anachronistically: it would not be known as Marvel for years to come. By 1949 Timely Comics (which would go through another name change before becoming Marvel) was having an identity crisis. The end of World War Two had damaged Timely's three main characters: Human Torch, Namor and Captain America. It had started moving away from superheroes to focus on Westerns like Two-Gun Kid, romances like My Romance and at times mixing the two together with comics like Rangeland Love. Timely even made an Archie-esque humour comic called Millie the Model and even got Archie artist Dan DeCarlo to write and draw for the comic from issue 18 in order to compete with Archie. The popularity of Adventures into the Unknown had spawned several other horror series so Timely joined in, tentatively at first. In August 1943 Timely's first publication as Timely, Marvel Comics or since issue two Marvel Mystery Comics, was renamed Marvel Tales in issue 93 featuring a cover featuring a shadowy ghoul. However, more shockingly was what they did with Captain America. Captain America's Comics in issue 74 was renamed Captain America's Weird Tales featuring a demonic looking Red Skull looming over a far smaller Captain America, seen only from behind, and Captain America was much smaller in the title compared to Weird Tales. Even the story embraced horror where Captain America fought Red Skull in Hell! The next issue only had Captain America in the title of the comic itself and eventually Captain America would be scrubbed out entirely. The cover was done by Gene Colan who would later be a major illustrator in Marvel and one of the few female illustrators.

Timely's first embracing of Horror

Timely in 1951 would launch two horror comics, Mystic and Strange Tales, who were often used interchangeably. Those who know their comic book history will recognise Strange Tales as the comic which would go on to publish Doctor Strange and Nick Fury stories. The reason for these publications was to compete with another company which we'll get to later on. In December Timely became Atlas and with it came more horror comics including Journey Into Mystery which would go on to publish Thor. Atlas would further embrace the horror trend even turning comics with little to do with horror into horror comics. In 1948 to entice fans of teen humour and a female audience Timely had started publishing a comic called Venus about the goddess who came to Earth, fell in love, and then hi-jinks ensued. As her popularity decreased by 1952 more fantasy and horror elements were brought in including her being embraced by a man whose face turned into a quite graphic skull. The comics started becoming increasingly graphic. In one, Suspense #29, future Marvel heavyweight Stan Lee and artist Joe Maneely had a cover featuring a man being buried alive with sheer and realistic terror on his face. One story in the comic, 'The Raving Maniac', featured a Stan Lee stand-in arguing with a stand-in for psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, a fierce critic of comics, who is dragged to an asylum. Astonishing #34, pictured below, is very graphic and disturbing featuring on its cover a terrified man awaiting the blade of a guillotine. 

This was published by the same people who would later publish Spider-Man!

Timely and Atlas never truly embraced horror. Although it had many horror comics it had an equal amount of romance and Westerns, and after the outbreak of the Korean War there was a boom in war and spy comics. At times it even continued to dabble in bringing back superheroes although this would not properly happen until Stan Lee and Jack Kirby took over. They were also fairly tame for the time compared to its competitors. Even though it's very intense Astonishing #34 had nothing on the comics by another company...

EC Comics - The Masters of Horror

Tales from the Crypt #31, compared to the comics from Atlas it is far more distressing featuring more graphic images, actual weapons, and depictions of violence

In 1944 a new company called Educational Comics was founded by Maxwell Gaines and, unsurprisingly, largely published educational comics for schools and Churches. He later was killed in a boating accident in 1947 bringing control of the company to his son, William. Being a veteran himself he knew that more mature stories would be popular so renaming the company to be Entertaining Comics, or EC, he began publishing darker stories. These dealt with sex, drugs, racism, justice, revenge, violence, and commentaries on society with Gaines himself even contributing to a few stories. EC soon made its mark for two reasons: its biting satirical comic MAD and its gory, graphic and violent horror comics. Over the course of 1950 three bi-monthly horror comics were published: The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and, most famously, Tales from the Crypt. There would be other comics like Weird Science and SuspenStories but these would be the main three. In practice there was little to distinguish each of the three comics with all of them featuring violent and graphic supernatural tales with accompanying images. Instead to differentiate the three each one had a 'host' who in most of the comics would link each story together. Vault featured a hooded old man named the Vault-Keeper who would later be joined by a scantily clad silent co-host called Drusilla; Haunt featured a cackling and almost disformed witch with one giant eye called the Old Witch; and Crypt featured sinister hermit sitting on the threshold of a crypt called the Crypt-Keeper. At times the hosts would appear in the comics themselves. As the comics progressed the hosts would become increasingly comedic making jokes as they introduced the stories and pretending to have a rivalry with each other. 

The hosts: top-right is the Crypt-Keeper; bottom-left is the Old Witch; and bottom-right is the Crypt-Keeper

Gaines had a surprising large influence in writing the stories often reading horror stories beforehand and then using that as a springboard to write stories. Several stories show clear inspiration from various H.P. Lovecraft stories, 'Voodoo Horror' in issue 17 of Vault shows inspiration from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and at least two stories in Haunt show inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Some stories showed a bit too much inspiration from stories by Ray Bradbury; so much so that Bradbury actually contacted EC about plagiarising his stories. They came to an agreement where EC would adapt six of his stories, two in each comic, and the charges of plagiarism were dropped. Stories often featured themes of ironic, and gruesome, poetic justice including one where a husband kills and stuffs his wife's cat only for her to take revenge by doing the same to him. Other stories included gory retellings of fairy tales, tales of conjoined twins (about nine stories all together), and satire on injustices in society including lynching, political corruption, racism, and antisemitism. Naturally all of this was accompanied by sex, suspense, violence, guts and gore. There's one cover from Crypt #44 which I like to imagine is the aftermath of the cover of Astonishing #34:

EC was never shy of showing the darker side of life. While Atlas was publishing heroic stories of soldiers EC was publishing stories of soldiers going mad. I can't show all of their more gruesome parts, I'm literally spoiled for choice, so I'll just show one: a man handcuffed to another man who's gorily being torn apart by vultures.

Why then did all this come to an end? Why don't we refer to EC in the same way we do Marvel, DC, or Dark Horse? Two words: public scandal.

The End and Legacies

The 1950s were times of change in the US. We saw the first steps of the African-American Civil Rights movement and Second Wave feminism causing great waves in society, but also there was a conservative backlash to changes. One reason for this was thanks to the Cold War and Red Scare. Fear of 'Reds under the Bed' spread across the US as individuals ranging from Richard Nixon to Walt Disney vowed to root out communist subversion. People were concerned that communists were attacking traditional values and Christian morality so there were cries to have them protected. There was a second reason concerning the youth. The 1950s saw the emergence of a teenage subculture, especially among the middle-class. As famously shown in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause a new generation born into affluence and bored with life emerged, and was willing to rebel against the family system. A moral panic happened targeting everything from movies to books to music; Catcher in the Rye's infamy came from this panic. Comic books were not exempt and child psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, lampooned by Stan Lee in Suspense #29, attacked the medium accusing comics of corrupting the minds of the youth. Wertham had caused a stir but what really damaged comics was his 1954 book Seduction of the Youth. He accused comics of encouraging violence, crime, and sex in a young and impressionable audience; among his accusations included saying that Batman and Robin were gay (bearing in mind the US was very homophobic), Wonder Woman promoted BDSM, Blue Beetle was a Kafkaesque nightmare, and Captain Marvel featured a decapitation. The book was criticised by contemporary comic writers, including Stan Lee, for distorting reality. For example, the 'decapitation' in Captain Marvel was really someone spilling invisible ink on someone's head and Blue Beetle was a human who dressed as a bug, not someone turned into a bug like in The Metamorphosis as Wertham claimed. In 2010 when his original research was officially released Carol Tilley found that he had even falsified his evidence that comics caused crime and mental illness; he purposefully used small test groups, children who had mental illnesses before reading comics, and even lied about results.

The Comics Code Authority which killed horror comics

Despite all this the population in moral panic mode believed Wertham. Stan Lee summed it up best:  it was like shouting fire in a theater, but there was little scientific validity to it. And yet because he had the name doctor people took what he said seriously, and it started a whole crusade against comics. A Senate committee on comics was formed with Wertham as chief witness and it even brought William Gaines up before it! The committee decided that comics did not cause crime but it did give a thinly veiled threat that comics had to voluntarily tone down the violence. Thus the Comics Code of Authority, referred to as CCA from now on, came into being. The CCA would give its stamp of approval to comics it deemed 'safe' which meant that comics couldn't be: too violent, allow villains to get away without seeing justice, showed sex, showed LGBT+ themes, or even mention 'horror' or 'zombie'. A comic could publish without adhering to the CCA but due to the Senate and moral panic if they wanted to actually get sales they needed the CCA's approval. However, EC regularly violated these rules so struggled to sell their comics. Within a year Vault, Crypt and Haunt all stopped publishing - only MAD managed to survive from EC's biggest titles. Horror comics, except Adventures into the Unknown which lasted until 1967, were wiped out. As a whole comics were throttled by the CCA and some interesting things came out of it, like Batman's 'no-kill, no-gun' rule, most times it hindered comics, especially with LGBT+ characters. Companies continued to use the CCA until the 1980s when comics became more willing to publish maturer comics which caused a domino effect. More and more comics started being published and were selling with CCA approval and soon companies stopped seeking CCA approval. By 2010 only three companies continued with the CCA, including strangely DC which in the 1980s had several major maturer comics like The Dark Knight Returns, but within a year no companies signed up to the CCA. 

Creepshow by Stephen King and George A. Romero is practically an EC comic on screen

The CCA is a big reason why we don't have as many horror comics today as you would expect but their brief time in the sun proved very influential. Particularly the EC horror comics were read by many people who in turn would keep the horror anthology series alive. In 1972 there was a Tales from the Crypt movie which adapted several stories from all of EC's comics which was overshadowed by HBO's own series of the same name. The Crypt-Keeper was re-imagined as a corpse and it adapted again stories from across EC's library. It even featured guest stars and directors including an episode by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then in 1982 two masters of horror, Stephen King and George A. Romero, came together to make an anthology film called Creepshow heavily inspired by EC's stories. The film opens with a boy having his horror comic taken away by his dad and who is later visited by the host of the comic called the Creep. We get the five stories from the comic featuring supernatural monsters, ironic revenge, dark comedy and features classic effects by Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead and Friday the 13th fame. A sequel was made but the third movie had nothing to do with King, Romero, and EC which also explains why it was terrible and direct-to-DVD holding 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the last ten years comic companies have reprinted the old EC horror comics introducing the tales of horror and suspense to a new generation. 

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. Catch the blog every week this month for other Month of Horror posts. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby. Also, in the UK it is Black History Month and to mark this on Facebook for every day we're doing a short post about something from black history if you want to check that out.