Five essential cyberpunk horror comics for fans of Image's w0rldtr33
Feb. 1, 2024As w0rldtr33 returns we examine five other comics that mix cyberpunk with horror
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Image’sw0rldtr33returned this week after a few months' break. We love this dark and weird series about a group of elite hackers who are attempting to save the world from a malicious entity that exists online.
Written byJames Tynion IVand drawn byFernando Blanco, w0rldtr33 mixes cyberpunk tropes with gruesome body horror and the very real fear of online radicalisation. The latest issue picks up with the characters dealing with the last will of mysterious businessman Gabriel Winter and trying to find Ellison Lane before time runs out for them - and the planet.
It’s another great issue, then, but w0rldtr33 is not the first comic to blur these two genres. Join us now, then, as we pick out five other essential cyberpunk horror comics that will make you think twice before logging on again…
Red Room
Hip Hop Family Tree creatorEd Piskor’s ambitious anthology straddles the crime, horror and cyberpunk genres. The first volume, subtitled ‘The Antisocial Network’, explores the idea of an untraceable criminal underworld that broadcasts brutal murders online to a depraved audience. Piskor has since released a further two volumes, ‘Trigger Warnings’ and the recent ‘Crypto Killaz’. Each issue follows a different character in a series of linked stories that map out a dark, sinister and honestly pretty depressing online world that’s not too far from our own. Despite the horror of it all, though, Red Room is also bitterly funny, with Piskor’s cartoony art style recalling Robert Crumb and old EC horror comics.
This unsettling body horror, written by Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler, drawn by Piotr Kowalski, and atmospherically colored by Niko Guardia, is perfect for fans ofDavid Cronenberg. InBeing is a startup that is trying to pioneer a new way of connecting humans - literally. After a series of disastrous trials go wrong, however, founder Sebastian takes a chance on a desperate young woman. The connection holds, but when the woman unexpectedly dies, Sebastian is left with her consciousness haunting his own. This four-issue series is a fascinating and gruesome new take on the body swap concept, one that also touches on issues of identity, privacy, and loneliness. It’s scary, yes, but it’s also shot through with a deep melancholy.
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In Memetic a simple image of a sloth against a hypnotic swirl of color goes viral, filling everyone who sees it with an inexplicable sense of happiness. The only trouble is, 12 hours after seeing the picture people turn into violent, feral zombies! Colorblind teenager Aaron and blind veteran Marcus are immune and must try to survive in a rapidly collapsing society, while searching for the creator of the deadly image. Written by James Tynion IV and drawn by artist Eryk Donovan, this three-issue limited series is brilliant fun and both silly and genuinely quite scary. It feels in some ways like a first draft of the ideas that Tynion IV is currently exploring in w0rldtr33, but with a healthy dose of bleak humour.
Will Salmon is the Comics Editor for GamesRadar/Newsarama. He has been writing about comics, film, TV, and music for more than 15 years, which is quite a long time if you stop and think about it. At Future he has previously launched scary movie magazine Horrorville, relaunched Comic Heroes, and has written for every issue of SFX magazine for over a decade. He sometimes feels very old, like Guy Pearce in Prometheus. His music writing has appeared in The Quietus, MOJO, Electronic Sound, Clash, and loads of other places and he runs the micro-label Modern Aviation, which puts out experimental music on cassette tape.
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