[3] In the early 20th-century, pulp magazines developed the horror subgenre "weird menace", which featured sadistic villains and graphic scenes of torture and brutality.

The first such title, Popular Publications' Dime Mystery, began as a straight crime fiction magazine but evolved by 1933 under the influence of Grand Guignol theater.

After the fledgling medium of comic books became established by the late 1930s, horror-fiction elements began appearing in superhero stories, with vampires, misshapen creatures, mad scientists and other tropes that bore the influence of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and other sources.

[5] In 1935, National Periodicals published the first story of Doctor Occult by Jerry Siegel (script) and Joe Shuster (Art) in New Fun Comics # 6, where he confronts Vampire Master.

[7][a] The single-issue Harvey Comics anthologies Front Page Comic Book (1945), bearing a cover with a knife-wielding, skeletal ghoul,[8] and Strange Story (July 1946),[9] introduced writer-artist Bob Powell's character the Man in Black, an early comic-book example of the type of omniscient-observer host used in such contemporary supernatural and suspense radio dramas as Inner Sanctum, Suspense, and The Whistler.

[18] Historian Ron Goulart, making no mention of those earlier literary adaptations, identifies Avon Publications' Eerie #1, dated January 1947[19] and sold in late 1946, as "the first out-and-out horror comic book".

[10] Its cover featured a red-eyed, pointy-eared fiend threatening a rope-bound, beautiful young woman in a scanty red evening gown, set amid a moonlit ruin.

[22] The first two issues, which included art by Fred Guardineer and others, featured horror stories of ghosts, werewolves, haunted houses, killer puppets and other supernatural beings and locales.

The premiere included a seven-page, abridged adaptation of Horace Walpole's seminal gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, by an unknown writer and artist Al Ulmer.

[60] A cover by Matt Baker from Phantom Lady was reprinted in the book with the caption, "Sexual stimulation by combining 'headlights' with the sadist's dream of tying up a woman".

The language used evoked images of children prowling about gambling dens and whorehouses, and anxious parents felt helpless in the face of such a powerful force as the comics industry.

The most widely discussed art was that from "Foul Play", a horror story from EC about a dishonest baseball player whose head and intestines are used by his teammates in a game.

Seduction of the Innocent sparked a firestorm of controversy and created alarm in parents, teachers and others interested in the welfare of children; the concerned were galvanized into campaigning for censorship.

[64] Classics Illustrated had adapted such horror novels as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in comic book form, and quickly issued reprints with new, less gruesome covers.

Titles like Skull (Rip Off Press/Last Gasp, 1970–1972), Bogeyman (Company & Sons/San Francisco Comic Book Company, 1969), Fantagor (Richard Corben, 1970), Insect Fear (Print Mint, 1970), Up From The Deep (Rip Off Press, 1971), Death Rattle (Kitchen Sink Press, 1972), Gory Stories (Shroud, 1972), Deviant Slice (Print Mint, 1972) and Two-Fisted Zombies (Last Gasp, 1973) appeared in the early 1970s.

As these and Warren publications disappeared, new titles from the 1980s onward would all be in new formats (i.e. glossy paper, not code-approved) or sporadically produced by small independent companies.

For instance, 1985 saw the revival of Kitchen Sink's Death Rattle, followed a year later by the debut of FantaCo's horror anthology Gore Shriek, edited by Stephen R. Bissette, who also contributed stories to each issue.

Printed in color on high-quality paper stock despite a higher cover price, the series Twisted Tales and Alien Worlds were short-lived and hard-pressed to keep to a regular production schedule, but offered some of the most explicitly brutal and sexual stories yet to be widely distributed in a mainstream ("non-underground") format.

Both series eventually moved to Eclipse Comics, which also produced similar titles such as The Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones and Alien Encounters (which they inherited from Fantaco).

[70] At Dark Horse, Mike Mignola has been working on Hellboy, and has created a large fictional universe with spin-off titles like BPRD and Lobster Johnson.

These erotic-horror comics were mostly published by Ediperiodici and Edifumetto, helmed by publishers/writers Giorgio Cavedon and Renzo Barbieri, respectively, and were part of the "pocket erotici" editorial craze, also known as "fumetti sexy".

[83][84][85][86] Since 2018 Annexia has been publishing one-shots, featuring brand new adventures of Ulula, Jakula, Sukia and Zora, among others, and in 2020 Editoriale Cosmo has reprinted some of the original stories in their "Classics of Italian Erotica" series.

[87] In the late 1980s, the genre became again popular, spearheaded by the Italian horror comic series Dylan Dog, created by veteran comic-writer Tiziano Sclavi, visually defined by cover artist Claudio Villa and published by Sergio Bonelli.

It has achieved great success, both in its homeland and abroad, with translations in the US (by Dark Horse Comics, with brand new covers by Mike Mignola), Germany, Spain, Serbia, Croatia, Denmark, Poland, Turkey and India.

Among them was ACME, which published two monthly horror anthologies titled Splatter and Mostri, which featured both original stories by promising young Italian artists (such as Bruno Brindisi, Roberto De Angelis and Luigi Siniscalchi, who later went to work for Bonelli, some of them even on Dylan Dog) and translated material.

These included long series such as Hakaba Kitarō by Shigeru Mizuki where characters from Japanese folkore coexist with the themes from teenage manga from the period.

Cat in these comics are often black, and have appeared in several stories through decades such as Kin'iro hitomi (1960), Neko to watashi to haha to buta (1968) and Bakeneko shojo (1982).

[101] Like the bakeneko, transformation is another key topic, with many stories of foxes, snakes, or cranes that transofmr into beautiful women for either revenge or to ensnare a man and bring him to ruin.

Comics have formed part of the media franchise for popular horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Army of Darkness.

Some horror films and television programs have had comic-book sequels, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, as well as prequels or interstitial stories, such as Saw: Rebirth and 28 Days Later: The Aftermath, respectively.