Much like the rest of the northern hemisphere, spring is here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
And it’s in full effect.
The daffodils have come out of the ground and, rising tall, opened to a bright yellow sun. The golden forsythia plants are all in bloom, colouring property lines everywhere. The buds on tree limbs are now just starting to show their later-season potential.
And the weeds.
Those horrible goddamn weeds have pushed themselves irrepressibly from their cold, waiting winter slumber and have begun pot-marking lawns with their de-beautifying, gut-wrenching, disfiguring, malicious intent.
Oh! The yearly spring despair of the homeowner!
The earth’s own physical transformation at this time of year is an en masse metaphor for a specific wing of terror for the horror-genre fan: body horror.
Body horror brings fear to readers, viewers and listeners of horror fiction due to its unnatural and graphic violations of a once-beautiful human form. It elicits fear and disgust and makes us turn away in wonderfully intense and passionate writhing and retching.
Primal, that feeling! Body horror is something we’ve all experienced.
Remember being a teenager and staring plaintively at the bathroom mirror and despairing at the sight of a red blemish across what was deemed a beautiful visage? Oh, that deliciously disgusting slow press of fingernail against fingernail, white pus bursting in a quick eruption and the unhurried ooze emanating out from a new, fiery crater there on your upper cheek?
Or how about that strange and painfully growing, raised cone-shaped circular infection under foot that required deft and careful work with a scalpel, weeks of desperate pumice stone scrubbing of tender skin alongside hopeful prayers of applied ointment?
Why, I heard a story of a man returned from a Caribbean beach excursion with a bubbling boil on his arm that discharged with wriggling larvae, offspring left under his skin by some unseen and unnoticed parasite during the vacation. Memories of warning, the next time you’re feeling adventurous in a foreign country.
Body horror is stomach-turning, must-turn-away-but-can’t, kind of stuff. It makes for some pretty interesting and revealing storytelling, too. And that’s what we get today with the release of Hello Body Horror #1.
Hello Body Horror #1
Written by: Various
Illustrated by: Various
Published by: Boom! Studios
We’ve mentioned the Hello Darkness series form Boom! Studios before in this column. It’s the anthology horror comic book series, first released in 2024, that contains fantastic tales of all kinds of terror from a plethora of comicdom’s best storytellers, along with a long list of great, new voices.
Occasionally, the publisher will release themed compilations of previously published tales. Last October’s Hello Halloween one-shot was one of those, which we highlighted here in The Wednesday Run column.
Today Boom! Studios do the same with the body horror subgenre.
Hello Body Horror #1 is a forty-eight-page one-shot compilation that gathers some of the best body horror tales from the Hello Darkness oeuvre of multiple comic book releases. Wrapped up in a variety of disturbingly juicy covers by acclaimed artists Rebecca Puebla, Jenny Frison, Yanick Paquette and Aaron Campbell are stories from the likes of writers and artists such as Mark Bouchard and Rye Hickman who bring readers “Body Positive” where a fitness influencer’s mind goes where her body cannot – until it finally can! Derick Jones, meanwhile, gives us “Minimal Scarring”, a shocking tale that tells of a plastic surgeon who uses left behind pieces of his patients’ bodies to transform…himself!
You might think Spring is a beautiful season, but look around. Look around with a new set of eyes, much closer than you normally would ever do. Nature’s body horror is all around you.
Spring, you see, is the perfect season to make the run to your local comic book shop, pick up and enjoy the compelling terror of Hello Body Horror #1.
To get a feel for the Hello Darkness series and stories, you can catch the original series trailer from 2024 directly below.
