15 Best Halloween Comics to Get You in the Halloween Spirit
Halloween is a special time of the year and people generally love it. What is so special about Halloween? Is it the atmosphere, the costumes, or the scary stories?
We’re not exactly sure, we’d have to ask an anthropologist or two for the answer, but we know how to provide you with all of these three things in our list of the best Halloween comics that are guaranteed to get you in the spirit of Halloween.
Our list is going to contain the 15 best Halloween comics, regardless of whether they are graphic novels, individual issues, or whole series. They are not going to be ranked based on any specific aspect, as our goal here is not to evaluate their quality but to get you in the right mood for the holiday.
Best Halloween Comics
We will provide you with the basic information on all of the titles on our list, including the authors, publication date, and the general plot. You’ll quite easily understand why we picked these titles specifically.
Batman: Haunted Knight
Author(s): Jeph Loeb
Artist(s): Tim Sale
Publication Date: 1996
Publisher: DC Comics
Haunted Knight is a set of short Batman stories released for Halloween. During the story “Fears”, Batman sets out in pursuit of the Scarecrow. As the title suggests, fear plays a big part in this story.
“Madness” tells the story of Captain James Gordon’s daughter, Barbara, who is kidnapped by the Mad Hatter and forced to drink tea with other kidnapped children. Batman and Gordon ultimately save Barbara and neutralize the Mad Hatter.
“Ghosts” is an adaptation of A Christmas Carol to the Batman universe with Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne, taking the place of Jacob Marley, and the three spirits being Poison Ivy (the Ghost of Christmas Past), the Joker (the Ghost of Christmas Present), and a Grim Reaper (the Ghost of Christmas to come) who turns out to be the ghost of Batman.
The message from the spirits is that Bruce shouldn’t let Batman take over his whole life.
Hellboy
Author(s): Mike Mignola
Artist(s): Mike Mignola
Publication Date: 1993 – present
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Anung Un Rama was born from the union of a demon and a human and lived in hell during his youth, until he was summoned in 1944 by Rasputin. The monk, having survived his assassination in 1916, had been hired by Heinrich Himmler and therefore worked for the Nazis.
The latter planned to use the creature to change the outcome of WWII, but the summoning did not go as planned and Anung Un Rama was eventually taken in and raised by the US military and Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, who gave him his name: Hellboy.
As an adult, he joined an agency specializing in the fight against paranormal threats, the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.
Locke & Key
Author(s): Joe Hill
Artist(s): Gabriel Rodríguez
Publication Date: February 2008 – December 2013
Publisher: IDW Publishing
After the gruesome murder of their father, the three Locke children, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode, move in with their mother Nina to Keyhouse, the ancestral home of their family. They soon realize that this house holds many secrets when they discover magical keys that hold incredible powers, such as turning a person into a ghost or erasing their memories.
They are not the only ones who know about the existence of these keys: a demonic creature named Dodge is also looking for them with the goal of opening the Black Door, which will give the demons of hell access to our world.
Nocturnals
Author(s): Dan Brereton
Artist(s): Dan Brereton
Publication Date: January 1995 – present
Publisher: Bravura (Malibu Comics), Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press, Image Comics
The Horror family is joined by a group of social outsiders who flee the light of day and mainstream society: spectral apparition, Polychrome; amphibious spitfire, Starfish; pyrokinetic swordsman, Firelion; reptilian, Komodo; streetwise animal-human chimera, Raccoon; the silent undead gunslinger, Gunwitch.
They will live in or visit the underground sanctuary of Doc Horror called Tomb, which is both the home and the stronghold of the group, as they battle the criminal underworld and various supernatural threats that often loom in nearby Pacific City.
Doc Horror’s main enemies are the Crim, a parasitic species of extra-dimensional conquerors who devastated his homeworld before he and Eva fled to Earth.
Tomie
Author(s): Junji Itō
Artist(s): Junji Itō
Publication Date: 1987 – 2000
Publisher: Asahi Sonorama
Tomie is a manga that takes the form of an episodic series centered on the titular character, Tomie. She is a particularly beautiful and manipulative teenager who possesses the ability to multiply and duplicate herself. In each episode, she bewitches men who are driven to murder or suicide and she sometimes turns pure young women into copies of herself.
Both executioner and victim, Tomie is regularly dismembered and cut into pieces by the men she has bewitched; she then regenerates from the different parts of her body or from her bodily fluids and then seeks revenge, but also to eliminate her doubles.
Blackest Night
Author(s): Geoff Johns
Artist(s): Ivan Reis
Publication Date: June 2009 – May 2010
Publisher: DC Comics
The story begins after the events of Final Crisis, as Black Hand uses the Black Lantern Corps battery located in sector 666 to create Black Lantern rings and thus resuscitate the dead DC characters (Batman, Firestorm, Aquaman, Deadman, Captain Boomerang, Skater, Sam Scudder, James Jesse, Top, Tula, Dolphin, Max Lord, the Martian Bloodhound, Roy Lincoln, Dee Tyler, Al Pratt, Katma Tui, Extansive-man, Sue Dibny).
Other characters are also transformed into Black Lanterns (Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Specter).
Gideon Falls
Author(s): Jeff Lemire
Artist(s): Andrea Sorrentino
Publication Date: March 2018 – December 2020
Publisher: Image Comics
The lives of a young inmate obsessed with a conspiracy hidden in the city’s garbage and a Catholic priest who is transferred to a small town full of dark secrets, are intertwined around the mysterious legend of The Black Barn, one building from another world that supposedly appeared both in the city and in the small town throughout history, bringing death and madness in its wake.
Gyo
Author(s): Junji Itō
Artist(s): Junji Itō
Publication Date: 2001 – 2002
Publisher: Shogakukan
Kaori and her friends spend their vacation in Okinawa at the cottage of Tadashi’s uncle, her fiancé. Two days before the end of their vacation, they return to the chalet in the evening and are surprised by a foul odor. Suddenly, a creature brushes past Aki, Kaori’s friend.
Reacting quickly, Kaori manages to crush the creature between a piece of furniture and the wall. It is a fish with legs that can walk on dry land, smelling rotting and preying on humans.
Having thrown it away, the girls think they are done with this story but the next morning, they are attacked by a shark in the same state as the fish of the day before. This is the start of an attack by creatures on humans.
Anyone who is a victim of these fish gradually transforms into a monstrous creature giving off the same scent. Little by little, from the coast, the fish invade the whole of Japan.
Batman: The Long Halloween
Author(s): Jeph Loeb
Artist(s): Tim Sale
Publication Date: 1996 – 1997
Publisher: DC Comics
June. Billionaire Bruce Wayne reluctantly attends the wedding of Johny Viti, the nephew of Carmine Falcone known as “the Roman”, the tyrannical godfather of the Gotham City underworld. At nightfall, the masked vigilante Batman surprises the burglar feline Catwoman breaking into the Italian mafioso’s safe.
As the thief evaporates into the dark corners of the city, the bat signal, lit by Police Captain James Gordon, lights up the Gotham sky.
On the roof of the police station, Batman, Gordon, and the young city attorney, Harvey Dent, make a pact to pool their assets to permanently bring down the mafia’s supremacy over their city, with the only condition imposed on respect for the law.
Halloween day. Returning from his honeymoon in Italy, the Roman’s nephew is murdered with two bullets in the head. This is the first in a series of assassinations carried out by the mysterious serial killer “Holiday”, whose particularity is to strike every public holiday.
Ice Cream Man
Author(s): W. Maxwell Prince
Artist(s): Martin Morazzo
Publication Date: January 2018 – present
Publisher: Image Comics
The series is a horror anthology of loosely related stories, all of which share the common bond of a mysterious glacier named Rick (revealed as Riccardus) who, while seemingly ordinary, possesses inexplicable powers that he exercises on unsuspecting people.
Rick’s nemesis, Caleb, a man dressed in an all-black cowboy outfit, will appear sporadically in the series, trying to thwart Rick’s plans, sometimes with success and sometimes without success.
Uzumaki
Author(s): Junji Itō
Artist(s): Junji Itō
Publication Date: January 19, 1998 – August 30, 1999
Publisher: Shogakukan
Kirie Goshima lives in the small town of Kurouzu, a little isolated between the sea and the surrounding mountains. She is a perfectly normal high school student, but her boyfriend’s father begins to behave in a disturbing way: he is obsessed with observing spiral-shaped objects.
This form is more and more present in the small town, as if it were under the effect of a curse.
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Author(s): Mike Mignola, Richard Pace
Artist(s): Troy Nixey
Publication Date: November 2000 – January 2001
Publisher: DC Comics
Inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this Elseworlds comic book depicts Batman as an adventurer similar to the protagonists of the 1920s pulp novels and stories. Batman has to fight a variety of Lovecraft-inspired monsters that are connected to his famous Rogues Gallery.
Jughead: The Hunger
Author(s): Frank Tieri, Michael Walsh
Artist(s): Frank Tieri
Publication Date: March 2017 – present
Publisher: Archie Comics
A serial killer is on the run in Riverdale, and Jughead Jones discovers he’s not only the killer, but a werewolf as well. Part of a long line of secret werewolf hunters, Betty Cooper is reluctantly convinced by Archie Andrews to use Wolfsbane to suppress Jughead’s Transfiguration rather than directly killing him.
Months later, Archie and Betty discover Reggie Mantle’s downed body and set off in search of Jughead, who is on the run. They are supported by the Cooper hunter clan and their leader Elena, Betty’s aunt. Reggie, now a werewolf herself, transforms and recruits other residents of Riverdale to get revenge on Jughead.
Marvel Zombies
Author(s): Robert Kirkman
Artist(s): Sean Phillips
Publication Date: December 2005 – April 2006
Publisher: Marvel Comics
The story is inspired by a crossover that began on the pages of Ultimate Fantastic Four: in this story, Mister Fantastic is teleported to a parallel universe in which the most powerful heroes on earth have mutated into zombies. Later it will be discovered how this mutation was caused by an alternate version of Sentry.
Now the apocalypse has begun, all the superheroes have been infected and are totally driven by the hunger for human flesh whose absence is capable of driving them crazy. They are also even more difficult to take down, as they are already dead. They can only be killed by depriving them of their brains.
A hearty lunch only gives them a short period of lucidity, until the hunger returns. Heroes like Luke Cage, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Wolverine have thus turned into emotionless beings, who wander hungry.
They are opposed by a small group of heroes who escaped the infection, led by Magneto, who fight to stem the madness of those who were once his companions and opponents and to prevent the spread of the virus in other universes.
From Hell
Author(s): Alan Moore
Artist(s): Eddie Campbell
Publication Date: 1999 (collected)
Publisher: Knockabout Comics / Eddie Campbell Comics
In Victorian England, the Duke of Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria, maintains, under a false identity, a romantic relationship with Annie Crook, a saleswoman from the East End in London. Their relationship results in a secret Catholic marriage and a child.
Queen Victoria puts an end to it: the Duke is removed from the capital and Annie Crook is interned in a lunatic asylum after having undergone a surgical operation which made her lose part of her mental faculties.
Unfortunately, a small group of prostitutes, Annie’s friends, try to take advantage of this situation to obtain the money demanded of them by a gang of racketeers in their neighborhood.
Alerted to this attempt at blackmail, Queen Victoria then asked the royal doctor, Sir William Gull, to silence these people in order to prevent the slightest scandal from splashing the throne of England.
