Richard Cook asks: can comics be scary?

Yes. Next question?

Asking whether or not comics can be scary is as boring and pointless as asking whether comics can be literature. Especially when you do it, like Cook does, by comparing comics to another medium, in this case film, and earnestly explain that comics are not able to do the same things movies do:

There’s certainly no way that comics can be scary in the same way that movies are scary. Comics can’t use mysterious noises or creepy music (textual representation of sound is a poor substitute). Also, since movie-goers instinctively understand that the world of the film extends beyond the view of the camera, horror films routinely have their monsters lurk just outside the frame. And they can startle the audience by having the monster (or a fake-scare cat) pop out from outside the camera’s view. In comics, establishing clear spatial relationships from one panel to the next is difficult enough without also having to imply that there’s something lurking off-panel. And the “temporally static” nature of comics makes it impossible to startle readers with anything popping out.

But the greatest advantage that horror movies have over comics has less to due with the technical differences between the media, and more to do with how the average person watches a movie. Over the decades, Hollywood and the theater chains trained audiences to watch movies in a certain way: you turn out the lights, ignore everyone else in the room, and stop thinking. Movie-goers become completely immersed in the narrative, and horror films exploit this immersion like no other genre. As an example, when the soon-to-be victim wanders through a dark hall to investigate a strange sound, the camera forces the viewer to follow the victim and vicariously experience everything they see and hear.

A mess of baseless assertions and naive reasoning there. You could argue in the exact same way that movies are completely unsuited for horror. How can you be scared when you’re watching the action on a silver screen metres away from you, always aware of that rectangular area, amongst dozens or hundreds of other peoplea ll sitting there munching popcorn? How can you immerse yourself fully that way when the music and camera swings always remind you of the artificiality of what you’re seeing?

There’s of course a long and venerable tradition of analysing comics in movie terms, but it becomes a crutch when you start to use it to determine what comics can and cannot do. It’s self evident that comics can scare people and the evidence can be found just by asking comics readers what comics scared them — in my own case both the X-Men “Days of Future Past” storyline as the Defenders story about hell on Earth scared the pants out of me when I first read them. There’s an equally long and venerable tradition of arguing about whether comics is a fully grownup medium capable of holding its place amongst its more succesful and respected cousins. But these discussions in the end always come down to personal opinions and tastes.

Far more interesting is to go beyond these very basic questions and look at how comics do things. If we assume that yes, comics can scare people, how do they do that? Given that you can’t use scary music and sound effects or any of the other tricks available to movies, how do you force a reader into immersion, then startle them? That’s something I would love to see experts (Steve Bissette or Curt Purcell perhaps) give their opinions on. Let’s find out how comics scare people than worry whether they can.