Also a
British horror comic aimed at kids. It ran for about 16 issues during
1984, then just died, which upset me greatly. I have every issue, sad bastard that I am. Some of the stories were genuinely disturbing, and it's a shame it had to
die so young. It was a bit of a ripoff of the
EC horror comics like
Tales From The Crypt, but it was still pretty cool.
Some of the characters and stories featured:
- The Dracula Files - a modern day continuation/retelling of the Dracula legend, which was quite nasty and effective.
- Beware the Werewolf - a cool strip about a detective hunting a werewolf.
- Monster - a hideously deformed guy locked away by his parents, due to his freakiness and immense strength. He escapes, kills them, and goes on the run with his only "freeeeeennnnd", the kid who discovers him and loves him unconditionally. This was a sympathetic, tragic tale, that taught me a lot about tolerance, discrimination, and not judging people on appearances. I cried at the end, too...
- Tales From The Grave - a different twist in the tale story every week, usually with lots of fingernail ripping, gouging, blood and gore.
- Ghastly McNasty - the editor. We never see his face. Bit like Bones, but without the nice line in shorts and sandals.
- The Cats - this ran for 6 issues, and basically involved the entire cat population of England going insane and killing people.
- The Thirteenth Floor - the best story in it, easily my favourite. A new tower block of flats/apartments is built, with a highly advanced, intelligent computer called Max as the superintendent. Due to superstition, like a lot of buildings it has no thirteenth floor - but when anyone hurts or threatens the tenants, Max takes them to his own version of this non-existent floor, and uses "computer projections" (dodgy science bit) to teach them a lesson (read: kill them). Bizarre images of death, zombies, grinning men in bowler hats with umbrellas, sharks - the victims usually ended up dying of fright. Max then hypnotises one of the tenants into disposing of the body for him. This story had some dead freaky imagery in it, and Max sometimes got a little bit power-crazy, which gave the whole thing a nice edge to it. I imagined his voice sounding a bit like Hal, which was probably the intention - he was always saying things like "I simply can't allow anyone to threaten one of my tenants with violence, now can I?"
By the way, if anyone knows how I can contact Ian Holland, script-guy for The Thirteenth Floor, I'd be very grateful, he hinted menacingly...