A unique phenomenon is 4 Panel Horror Comics. It is exactly as the title describes, a weekly four-panel comic delivering a nightmare to your desktop or phone. This is not a continuing narrative carried over from week to week (at least not at first). Each episode begins with a precise setting-up of the situation, and concludes with a shocking surprise.
And these brief vignettes are actually quite good. Most of them are funny and surprising, and some of them, like episode 32 “The Thing in the Attic”, evoke feelings of dread that will stay with you.
The horror category (at least in film) has developed a growing subgenre of situational horror; unlike Gothic horror, these stories require no haunted house or graveyard; terror arises from commonplace things, like a hitchhiker or a video tape or a light switch. Shadowhouse Films would do well to check this series out when scouting ideas for their next franchise.
Brisbane, Australia artist Karl Kwasny is a book illustrator best known for Nightmares! and The Year of Shadows. His macabre B&W art is a perfect fit for the comics series, employing minimal details to maximum effect, balancing humor with palpable horror. His attention to detail is admirable– often the surprise ending of a story is foreshadowed in a tiny detail in the first panel, a drop of blood or a foreboding shadow.
