The Webcomic Overlook #214: False Positive

There’s something about horror that’s perfect for anthology series. After all, the entire format almost entirely depends on some sort of ironic and sudden conclusion. The mystery and the shocks sometimes contain more impact the shorter you keep the story. Make it longer — like, say, what the movie The Box did to a compact story written by Richard Matheson — and it can get a little too convoluted for its own good.

The most infamous example in comics is a publishing firm called Entertaining Comics … or, as everyone knows them by, EC Comics. The publisher worked on several anthology comics — from crime fiction to military fiction to science fiction. Its most enduring title, though, was its horror anthology: Tales From The Crypt. It was a magazine borne from the fires of World War II. Boys who were forced to endure the horrors of war just weren’t happy with the kiddie superhero stuff anymore. They were men now, daggumit! They wanted to see blood and gore, sex and violence.

Tales From The Crypt, though, would eventually run afoul of special interest groups and, eventually, the United States Congress. The anthology format lives on, though, especially in horror-themed webcomics. A couple of years ago, I took a look at Split Lip, which hopped from one macabre story to another. It was highly effective in compactly telling each horror story.

It’s not the only horror anthology out there, though. Today, we look at Mike Walton’s False Positive.