They Came From Beyond The Newsagent!

I seem to have started writing an essay on 1970s and 80s British horror comics as inspirations for They Came From Beyond The Grave!

Misty started in the late 70s and Scream! in the balmy summer of 1984 but were more 60s and 70s style horror than what was happening with the genre at the time - the kind of horror movies kids would know from late-night TV and cultural osmosis. (Dracula had been the subject of a Wall’s ice lolly in 1981, as well as previous and later variations...)

Misty I only know after the fact because it was marketed at girls, though nowadays some stories have appeared in combined specials with Scream! showing its genre more clearly. It was mostly an anthology. Of its bigger series, The Sentinels is a great setup that would actually fit Chronicles Of Darkness better, perhaps as God-Machine Infrastructure.

The big runners in Scream! were:

The Dracula Files, which may have taken some cues from the ongoing hunt in Marvel’s Tomb Of Dracula. As the title implies, it would also also work with Night’s Black Agents, as a rogue KGB agent pursues the vampire in the UK.

The Thirteenth Floor, a sort of VR Nightmare On Elm Street about a tower block’s security computer protecting its residents in a slightly odd manner - basically an anthology strip with hints of a possible metaplot.

Monster, which takes the misunderstood Frankenstein creature and runs with it as the title character is an innocent.

The Nightcomers, about the teenage children of psychic investigators facing THE DEVIL HIMSELF or something in the house their parents died trying to escape - you could port this one straight to TCFBTG! as a one-shot or series setup.

It never went as dark as its stablemate 2000 A.D. and never produced as mad a variation on the genre as Fiends Of The Eastern Front, but that’s a high bar.