Patterns beneath the grid: the haunted spaces of Folk Horror comics

Much like tales of haunting and Folk Horror, the comics page is built on presence and absence, the former in terms of what is shown, often in sequential panels that fragment the narrative, the latter those moments between actions that exist within the mind's eye of the reader. This space can be considered the ‘ghost soil’ (Southwell 2019) that draws from the ‘spectral’ reader's schematic knowledge of place and story. The comics page is seen simultaneously as a whole and as separate temporal moments so that the comics page itself can be seen topographically as a ‘haunted space’ (Round 2014) where past, present, and future become co-present within a single space. Comics can, thus, be viewed as haunted texts, locating the medium as unique in ways that Folk Horror themes can be explored and actualised. Scovell's (2017) Folk Horror chain of landscape, happening/summoning, isolation and skewed beliefs can be applied to comics both in terms of narrative structure and form.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in comics production that fall within the broad area of Folk Horror. UK-based examples tend to be independent (small press, web-based or crowdfunded) or self-contained graphic novels (see list below). This chapter will be a selective analysis that seeks to explore the unique ways form reflects content.