Welcome to 31 Days of Horror Comics, where I will spotlight some of the best horror comics around, as chosen by a bunch of my favorite horror comic writers and artists around!

Today's creator is Gabriel Hernandez Walta, who is perhaps best known for his brilliant Vision series with writer, Tom King, but as you can tell from the moody, atmospheric work that Walta has brought to his superhero work, he's also an acclaimed horror comics artist.

One of his very first comic book works was an adaptation of a Clive Barker story for IDW...

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and he teamed up with El Torres for a pair of excellent horror series, including Suicide Forest...

For his suggestion, Walta went back a bit to his own comic book past by recommending a story from the Clive Barker-inspired Hellraiser series that Marvel did in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Gabriel explained his choice of "Dead Things Rot" from Clive Barker's Hellraiser #13, by Mike Mignola & D.G. Chichester (along with Mark Nelson's inks, Marck Chiarello's color art and Jaede Moede's lettering).

Clive Barker is the only horror writer that actually scared me, while enjoying his beautifully written stories, and Mignola and Chichester totally nailed (no pun intended!) the same mood with this short comic. I also love that in only fifteen pages they managed to develop a whole story with awesome character design, great use of TV as exposition device and a wonderful ending.

The tale is about a creepy man in an rundown apartment...

We discover that he is a serial killer, who boils his victim's body parts down to the bone but then doesn't seem to do anything with them but display them around his apartment, while he talks to the TV...

We then cut to the hell dimension, where a Cenobite named Clown (or Winky Dink) is torturing a man who had delivered a number of souls to the hell dimension and is now getting his "reward." He tries to cut a bargain. I love the bit where he manages to sort of convince one of the Cenobite's pets to agree with him (and the mercy is rewarded with destruction)...

They cut a deal and Thorndike begins speaking to the serial killer, getting him to create a body out of the body parts...

Thorndike is then brought back to life and delivers the serial killer to the Clown...

Man, Mignola is a genius, isn't he? He was doing stunning work like this way before Hellboy.

Anyhow, the bargain is struck, but you know you shouldn't make a deal with a demon and Thorndike soon learns, as the title of the story notes, dead things rot.

It's a nice twist in a well-told story overall.

Thanks for the suggestion, Gabriel!