Comics as modern frescoes

Stephen King’s Creepshow comic book

Once upon a chapel wall, saints and sinners lined up in perfect moral order, haloed and horrified.

Today, they wear capes or hooded cloaks. Comics are our frescoes, sequential stories splashed not across plaster but glossy paper, trading tempera for toner.

The old masters painted salvation, modern ones ink horror, chaos, heartbreak, and radioactive spiders. Both invite us to look up (or down) and believe in something larger than ourselves.

This World Comic Book Day, I’m curled up with my battered old copy of Creepshow — Stephen King’s gloriously gory tribute to pulp horror. The panels are deliciously lurid, the humour blacker than my under-eye circles, and every page smells faintly of nostalgia and nightmares. Reading it feels like stepping into a flickering drive-in cinema of my own imagination. Comics like this prove that stories don’t need to be “high art” to crawl under your skin — they just need to mean something to you.

So, what’s lurking in your favourite comic today — and does it give you the chills?

x Victoria