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 J.M. DeMatteis, who has been writing horror comics for basically forty plus years now. He just recently finished an excellent horror-esque story, Girl in the Bay, for Karen Berger's Dark Horse line of comics. His most famous comic book storyline, Kraven't Last Hunt, was basically a horror story in a superhero comic. However, I'll spotlight his earliest horror work, just because it was just SO striking how this guy broke right into comics and was pretty much instantly knocking out major horror hits. DeMatteis started in comics working for DC's horror anthologies and within a couple of years, he co-created both the Creature Commandos...

AND I, Vampire...

That would be a heck of a resume for anyone and J.M. has kept going with many other great works in the next four decades!

J.M. was one of the first creators I thought of when I started this bit, but the "problem" is that his two choices were two of the most popular choices among all the creators who sent in suggestions, to the point where I eventually had to start telling people to maybe avoid these stories in their picks. So, depending on what later suggestion-givers used, I was going to use either one of J.M.'s two picks, and it turned out I am going to go with his pick of Bernie Wrightson and Len Wein's Swamp Thing.

Here's J.M. on their iconic run, "I remember discovering Swamp Thing when it first came out and I’d never read anything like it. The emotional pulp poetry of Len’s writing and the oozy, eerie brilliance of Bernie’s art combined to create a book that paid tribute to classic horror and yet deepened the genre in both heart and mind."

Swamp Thing debuted as a character in a House of Secrets story by Wrighton and Wein in House of Secrets #92, with a classic Wrightson cover (with future comic book writer, Louise Simonson, as the model for the woman on the cover - she was married to one of Wrightson's best friends at the time)...

It is a story set in the past featuring a familiar, but different version of the Swamp Thing mythos...

The story was a big enough hit that DC green-lit an ongoing series based on the story, so Wein and Wrightson re-told the story in modern times, with the characters now Alec and Linda Holland...

Such striking work from Wrightson.

Check out Swamp Thing in action...

That first issue introduced the concept of an evil conspiracy known as the Conclave, but then Wein and Wrightson quickly added to the Swamp Thing Rogues Gallery in the second issue, with the introduction of the disturbing Un-Men...

The Un-Men were unlike anything a typical reader would have seen in a comic book at this point in time.

Wrightson continues with the striking full-page splashes, as the Un-Men take Swamp Thing to their master's castle...

where we meet Anton Arcane...

Arcane seemingly dies at the end of the issue. In the first issue, we also met Lt. Matt Cable, who thinks Swamp Thing is a murderer and is intent on hunting him down. The third issue introduces Abigail Arcane, the good niece of the evil Arcane...

So, three issues in, we already have the star of the book, Swamp Thing, but two good villains (The Conclave and Anton Arcane), plus two human supporting characters in Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane. That's some sharp world building by Wein and Wrightson.

The book then mostly centered on Swamp Thing wandering into different weird scenarios in every issue, sort of like the Hulk wandering from town to town, while Cable and Arcane tracked him down.

In Swamp Thing #7, Swamp Thing heads to Gotham City for a Conclave story. This is one of the first times Batman ever vanished on Commissioner Gordon...

In Swamp Thing #10, Wrightson's final issue on the book, Arcane returns in a freakish new body...

What an amazing start to one of DC's most iconic horror characters.

Thanks for the suggestion, J.M.!