(Not so) Scary comicbook

Not nearly as frightening as it perhaps
should be

So, because I've been contributing short stories to a number of small press publishers for the past few years, on occasion I’ve pick up some other horror anthologies (books to which I’m not contributing), and have been — well — seriously underwhelmed by what I’ve seen. The stories I’ve read, itn the anthologies I’ve seen keep going back to the “Uncle Creepy”/EC style of “gotcha” ending that I’ve been reading all of my life and, well, it just isn’t frightening any more.

Yeah, yeah I know that when I was 10, this stuff was scary, but I’m not 10 any more, and even if there were 10-year-olds reading comics these days, the crap that publishers are throwing at us just don’t do it, plus so much   of  of the art is simplistically bad and the stories themselves are just bad. That I have to wonder how these writers and artists (and editors) can get work.

I hate to sound arrogant, but seriously, not only is my stuff much better than what I’m reading, but so is the work of my fellow creators whose work appears alongside mine in these anthologies is also way much better than what I’m seeing in other anthologies.

To this end, I want to direct folks to the Atlas Unleashed titles to which I contribute, Free Lunch Comics, and to Main Enterprises. Three examples of most excellent work.