WANTED: Your 2000AD / UK comic anecdotes for charity book!

[Stegron]

Stegram, here is my amended recollection:

Comics have rarely scared me or freaked me out, but I will always remember some panels by Jose Ortiz.  I am reliably informed these were from 'The House of Daemon', which ran in The Eagle in 1982.

The owners of a newly built house get stuck in a nightmarish maze created by 'Daemon', a supernatural entity, who creates horrible worlds for them to live through or (more often than not) die in.  The freaky panels of one particular story saw a group of unfortunates trying to escape goblins, which reached up from under the sand or mud and pulled them under.

The horror of either suffocation under the earth or being torn apart by subterranean humanoids was too much for me - I've treated mud flats and sandy beaches with suspicion ever since.

Lovely stuff, Shaolin, thank you! I'd forgotten about House Of Daemon completely - Doomlord, Sgt Streetwise and (of course) Nu Dan Dare are seared into my memory, but Daemon managed to slip through the cracks.

I can feel an addition or two to the comics section coming on... 

[Stegron]

I remember standing in a newsagents reading through Starlord - the sequence where the woman bites into the fruit and then drowns in its juices horrified and fascinated me in equal parts. I remembered it vividly long after I'd forgotten where I'd read it...

Oh God, that SERIOUSLY freaked me out as a kid. I can still see her, the juices running out of her mouth like a river as she drowned. *shudder*

[Stegron]

Anyone remember a tv show on BBC called The Enchanted Castle? Some children put on a play and made an audience of stuffed dummies who all came to life and chased them. That absolutely scared the bejeebus out of me.

Woah. Thanks for that scan, Gypsum - chilling indeed. One of the things we'll discuss in the book is the carefree way that creators actively encouraged scaring and shocking the bejeezus out of little kids back in the 70s and 80s. Take 'Action', for instance. I was only 5 when it came out, and never read it at the time. Reading the scans now, at the ripe old age of 43, genuinely shocked me. My jaw was dropping open, it seemed, at every other page. But it was EXACTLY what kids wanted!

I'll have to try and find out about the Enchanted Castle, it sounds great. And the book will feature a mix of the obvious (Doctor Who, Tomorrow People, Sapphire and Steel) and the more obscure (Sky, King Of The Castle, Beasts, The Changes, etc).

[Heath C Ackley]

Fiends Of The Eastern Front springs to mind when considering strips that creeped me out as a kid. Ezquerra' s b&w artwork gave the story a gritty and yet haunting atmosphere.
Who could forget Death? The Superfiend is a figure of pure horror; gothic, macabre, part-spirit part-cadaver and all bastard.
I remember those Future Shocks that gnawed at the nerve like teeth on bone, 'Food' for instance. There were some  stories that were not blood and guts scary but still haunting all the same. I particularly recall 'The Symbiote' from the 1978 annual. It was a tale of loss, love and sorrow. The Ro-Busters story 'Bax The Burner' by Moore and Dillion had a similar effect on me.
(On the subject of horror and 2000ad, I can't help but mention the look of absolute fear on my parent's faces as they took a peek at the new comic their sons were raving about. From Whizzer and Chips to dinosaurs feasting on cowboys and polar bears chomping down on CIA agents in one fell swoop!)

[Stegron]

I've just thought of a 2000AD story that scared the shit out of me - 'SHOK!' from the 1981 Dredd annual.

The story that *ahem* 'inspired' the film Hardware. with some of Kev O'Neill's most unsettling artwork, it was the final panel that did me in as a 10 year-old: the war robot, wearing the main character's wife's hair, with that jutting spike sticking out of it's throat. Dunno why, but that image stayed with me for ages!