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Image's w0rldtr33 returned 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 by James Tynion IV and drawn by Fernando 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 creator Ed 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.
Empty Zone
Writer/artist Jason Shawn Alexander, currently best known for drawing Killadelphia, created this weird cyberpunk thriller for Sirius Entertainment back in the '90s and it was belatedly revived by Image in 2015. Corinne White is an ex-soldier living in a dystopian future who is (literally) haunted by the ghosts of her past who reveal a plot to reanimate the bodies of the dead. The series halted rather abruptly in 2016, but perhaps there's still hope for more. Fans have been asking for another volume for years and as recently as 2021 Alexander still seemed keen. Given the large gap between the initial issues and the Image revival, let's never say never on this one.
Come Into Me
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 of David 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.
Singularity 7
Artist Ben Templesmith both wrote and drew this four-issue series for IDW in 2004. The world has been remade into a post-apocalyptic hellhole by alien nanites, forcing the surviving humans to live in cities underground. Chon is a young man who survives an attack by the Gosiodo - the human-machine hybrids that live on the surface. Rescued by other humans, Chon and a group of other survivors embark on a suicide mission to destroy the Singularity - the force that transformed the world in the first place. Templesmith's distinctive, impressionistic art style is in full effect in this bleak and atmospheric comic that feels like The Matrix meets (unsurprisingly) 30 Days of Night.
Memetic
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.
We named w0rldtr33 one of the best comics of 2023.
