5 Horror Comics Every Metalhead Should Read

I’ve been running a website, 2 substacks and 2 youtube accounts for a while now and, to be frank, I’m tired. So as I begin to pull over the posts from my other substack account I began to think: ‘how can I introduce my other dark music content to fans of comics without polarising that audience?’

Well, I think I’ve come up with a good happy medium. Enjoy today’s post!

There’s a reason the worlds of extreme music and horror comics have always bled into each other.

The same impulse that drives you to put on a Cannibal Corpse record at 2am — that need to stare into the void and dare it to blink first — is exactly what horror comics have been feeding since EC Comics were getting burned by concerned parents in the 1950s. Both are outsider art forms obsessed with death, transgression, and the ugly truth that the world is a far darker place than polite society wants to admit.

If your record collection looks like a crime scene and your wall art consists mostly of Frazetta prints and repro Venom Welcome to Hell sleeves, you already know you’re the target market.

Here are five horror comics that belong on your shelf.

Garth Ennis doesn’t do horror by halves.

The man who spent years gleefully dismantling superheroes in The Boys turned his full attention to the apocalypse genre and produced something genuinely, uncompromisingly vile — and we mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Crossed is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which a plague spreads through humanity that strips away every social inhibition and replaces it with pure, ecstatic cruelty. The infected — marked by a cross-shaped rash across their faces — don’t just want to kill you. They want to degrade every last thing that makes life worth living first. This isn’t zombie fiction. It’s something considerably worse.

For fans of death metal — a genre that has always used grotesquerie as a philosophical tool rather than shock for its own sake — Crossed operates on a similar frequency. The horror isn’t random. It’s a sustained argument about what human beings are capable of when the thin membrane of civilisation is punctured.

Jacen Burrows’ artwork is meticulous, clinical, and devastating. It never flinches. Neither should you.

Before Constantine became a sanitised Hollywood property, he was a chain-smoking, morally bankrupt British occultist who got his mates killed and sold his soul more times than even he could keep track of.

The original Hellblazer run — spanning 300 issues across 25 years of Vertigo publishing — is one of the great sustained achievements in horror comics, and it belongs in the same conversation as the albums that defined the occult end of the metal spectrum.

Start with Jamie Delano’s opening arc for fog-soaked Thatcherite dread and demons crawling up through London’s economic underbelly. Move to Garth Ennis’ run for something more personal and brutal — his story “Dangerous Habits” remains one of the finest things ever committed to the medium. Paul Jenkins and Brian Azzarello both took the character to ugly, fascinating places.

The appeal here for metalheads is the same as the appeal of early Paradise Lost or Type O Negative. It’s horror rooted in grief, guilt, and the specific bleakness of knowing you’ve caused harm you can never fully repair. Constantine is not a hero. He’s a survivor, and sometimes those are worse.

“These aren’t recommendations for casual horror fans. These are comics that use darkness the same way extreme music does: as a lens, a philosophy, a way of telling the truth about the world that polite society won’t touch.”

3. Wytches — Scott Snyder & Jock (Image Comics, 2014)

If Crossed is death metal and Hellblazer is doom, then Wytches is black metal — sparse, atmospheric, and deeply invested in the idea that the natural world is not your friend.

Scott Snyder strips witches back to something pre-fairy tale and genuinely primordial. These aren’t cackling hags or stylish occultists. They are ancient, hungry things that live in the trees, and human beings have been making deals with them — pledging their loved ones in exchange for favours — since before recorded history. The horror is folk and familial and suffocating.

Jock’s artwork is some of the most distinctive in contemporary comics. He works with a scratchy, anxious line that feels like someone drew these pages with their hands shaking. The colour washes by Matt Hollingsworth bleed and drip across the pages in a way that feels genuinely organic and wrong.

For anyone who has ever sat with the early Wolves in the Throne Room discography and stared out a window at a dark tree line, this comic was made for you. The wilderness is not safety. The wilderness is where the old deals get made.

This is the one you put on like you put on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas — with the full understanding that you are committing to something that will change how you see things, and that you do not take it lightly.

Alan Moore’s exhaustive, obsessive, historically-dense account of the Jack the Ripper murders is not a whodunit. Moore tells you who he thinks committed the murders in the opening pages. What From Hell is actually about is power — specifically, the Victorian power structures that made the murders possible and then made certain they would never be properly solved. It is about the architecture of oppression. It is about ritual, London as an occult text, William Gull’s genuinely terrifying perspective as a man who has rationalised his actions into a kind of religious ecstasy.

Eddie Campbell’s dense, scratchy black-and-white artwork is not pretty. It is not supposed to be. It is the visual equivalent of reading a century-old autopsy report by candlelight.

If you’ve ever been drawn to the historical and ideological darkness that underpins a lot of extreme metal — the way bands like Nile or Behemoth use historical atrocity as a lens for understanding human nature — From Hell is the comic that operates at that same register. This is serious, difficult, essential work.

Every metalhead who grew up as an outsider, as the kid who was a little too weird for the suburb they were born into, will find something in Black Hole that feels uncomfortably personal.

Set in suburban Seattle in the mid-1970s, Burns’ story follows teenagers contracting a sexually transmitted plague that causes physical mutations — tails, second mouths, shed skin, lesions. Some hide their mutations and try to pass. Others retreat to the woods outside of town and form a counter-community of the marked and the cast-out. Nobody gets a clean resolution.

Burns’ artwork is rendered in dense, immaculate black and white — every shadow deliberate, every face slightly wrong in ways you can feel before you can articulate. It is body horror in the purest sense, but the body horror is also adolescence, and sexuality, and class, and the particular alienation of being a teenager who can see through the performance of normalcy even when they can’t escape it.

Black Hole is the comic version of a Swans record. It is slow, beautiful, deeply disturbing, and it will stay with you for a long time after you put it down. That’s not a warning. That’s the recommendation.

The through-line across all five of these books is the same thing that runs through the best extreme music: a refusal to look away from what is real and terrible about human existence, and the conviction that confronting darkness directly is more honest — more humane, even — than pretending it isn’t there.

These aren’t comics for people who want to be comforted. They’re comics for people who understand that some truths only come out in the dark.