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 final horror comics creator is Jeff Lemire, who has always had a haunting aspect to his work, but has been doing a lot more traditional horror comics recently, like the excellent Gideon Falls...

and he has an upcoming Image series with Phil Hester...

Jeff's suggestion is Sandman #6 by Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, the famous "24 Hours Diner" issue featuring Doctor Destiny tormenting a random group of diner patrons.

A standard superhero trope is the notion of showing the big bad guy kill off an established character who we know to be powerful in his/her own right. This way the reader knows that the bad guy is a real threat to the hero of the book. In his own particular fashion, that is what Neil Gaiman does with Doctor Destiny in Sandman #6, the penultimate issue of the initial storyline in Sandman (where Morpheus is freed after decades in captivity and proceeds to search for his totems of power). Doctor Destiny has the last totem, the powerful ruby, which can help re-shape reality itself!!

Before the confrontation between Morpheus and Destiny, though, we see the power of the ruby in action at a 24 Hour Diner that Destiny has chosen to hang out in until Morpheus comes a-callin'.

Gaiman does a wonderful job introducing the issue as we meet the "powerful" waitress, Bette, who, in her mind, controls the lives of all her regular customers through her stories.

Of course, Destiny ends up ACTUALLY controlling all of their lives (and then there is the whole matter of where Gaiman himself plays into the comic, as the writer who is controlling EVERYTHING in the comic).

As time goes by, Destiny slowly begins to impose his will on the customers and Bette...

Things slowly descend even further than this.

It is a grim, stark and often disturbing avenue that Destiny takes these people, but all the while it is stunningly brilliant in its depravity. In addition, Gaiman is sure to find the quiet nobility in the hearts of these average schmoes who have gotten caught up in Destiny's web.

The artwork from Mike Dringenberg and Jones III is powerful and well stylized.

This is an excellent, if harrowing comic book, and it showed that even quite early on in Sandman, Gaiman was a force to be reckoned with (okay, the battle between Morpheus and the demon in #4 already made that perfectly evident, but whatever!).

Here's Jeff's excellent write-up on the issue...

"My pick for favorite horror comic would have to be the “24 Hours Diner” issue of Sandman. I read that issue soon after i came out, so I would have been about thirteen or fourteen years old and that was a truly horrifying comic book to read at the time. I love all of Sandman, and put the series in my personal pantheon of all time greats, but I do have a fondness for the early issues of the series when it had a bit more of a “horror” vibe rather than the fantasy series it would soon evolve into. And this issue is the epitome of that early horror feel. Mike Drigenberg's art was so gritty an realistic, and I think what made that issue particularly horrifying was that it was real people, wonderful rendered and made flesh by Gaiman's writing, that were doing horrifying things to one another. I know that John Dee was the ultimate villain of the piece, but there really were no monsters or boogy men attacking the people in the diner, they were attacking themselves and one another, and that was terrifying to me. There is a panel where a character stabs themselves in the eyes that haunted me for a while. "

Thanks for the great write-up and thanks for the excellent recommendation, Jeff! A lot of people recommended early Sandman, but Jeff's write-up made me give him the edge.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Be sure to check out the full 31 Days of Horror Comics here.