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 Queenie Chan, who is the brilliant creator of the spine-tingling comic book series, The Dreaming, for Tokyopop...

Chan has done a lot of great comics since in a variety of genres, but she'll always have her horror bonafides from The Dreaming...

Queenie's suggestion is Junji Ito's classic, Uzumaki, which she recommended as an example of how "a good comic artist can find horror in the most mundane, silly things."

Uzumaki is a three-volume collection of stories of a small town called Kurôzu-cho. Viz translated it into English (translated by Yuji Uniki). Slowly, but surely, the people of the two are driven insane by spirals. The hero of the story is Kirie Goshima. She tends to be a bit of a centerpiece for the drama, along with her boyfriend, fellow high schooler Shuichi, who is the first person to realize that something is messed up about this town (he realizes it when he goes out of town to attend a different high school).

Shuichi's father is the first one to become totally obsessed with spirals...

This leads to the first (of many) disturbing scenes in Uzumaki, when Shuichi's mother throws her father's spiral collection out...

Eventually, he becomes so obsessed that he kills himself - but that is not the end of it. He comes back even after death in a spiral of ashes!

This drives his widow insane...



Things continue along this way for the rest of the series. It's really outstanding stuff and makes the ides of basing a comic on the horrors of SPIRALS actually work.

Thanks for the suggestion, Queenie!