Beware the Nice Ones, Thorgal!
Thanks to realistic artwork, captivating storytelling and a believable ancient fantasy setting the Belgian-Polish comic strip series Thorgal has had its fair share of creepy imagery, Squick and haunting tales. Many stories feature gruesome monsters, frightening creatures, diabolical villains, violent deaths and mind boggling out-of-this-world afterlives or parallel universes,...
Examples:
- A short story in "The Sorceress Betrayed" has Thorgal fall in a glacier gorge. When he regains consciousness he is in the middle of a beautiful paradise garden where three young women live. They claim time passes by much slower inside the garden then outside, which means that Thorgal has been down there for over a year by now. Thorgal feels the urgent need to escape and is accompanied by the youngest of the three, who believes her older sisters have made the entire story up. She and Thorgal manage to get out of the glacier and decide to take a rest afterwards. When Thorgal wakes up the next morning he sees that the young girl has changed into an old skeleton, proving her sisters were right all along!
- In "Past the Shadows" Thorgal and a young woman named Shaniah travel past the beginning of time and arrive in the after life where they meet a Grim Reaper-like creature who has no pupils in his eyes. He tells them that he cuts people's life threads and that they can leave by cutting one of the threads for him. Thorgal tries, but is plagued by his conscience, while Shaniah takes his bow from his hands and shoots an arrow that cuts one of the threads anyway. After this they are allowed to leave, but Shaniah is unable to, because it turns out she cut her own life thread and is thus officially dead and must stay in this afterlife forever.
- In the same story Thorgal and Shaniah are told not to stray from a path, despite attempts by ghosts to tempt them to leave the path and join them. At first Thorgal remains cool and concentrated when confronted with these unrealistic taunting images. Then he sees his long lost wife and runs towards her to embrace her, thus leaving the path. Then the fake image of his wife changes into a hideous monster!
- In "The Starchild" there's a short story called "The Metal That Doesn't Exist" in which a young Thorgal and Tjadzhi encounters a very creepy giant with four arms.
- In "The Archers" an archer contest is held. Each competitor has to shoot arrows at their colleague (who holds a target in front of his belly) from a large distance. Naturally, only the most skilled bow and arrow experts are able to do this without accidentally shooting the other competitors dead. The idea alone is horrifying enough, but one man suddenly thinks he and his brother have won and while rejoicing lifts his bow a bit too high, causing the arrow to miss the target and kill his own brother!
- "Wolf Cub" plays out as a horror story, with Vikings being killed off by either Thorgal or an unnamed hunchback during the nightly storm.
- The album "Arachnea" should be avoided by readers afraid of spiders. Thorgal fights a Giant Spider, who turns out to be a woman who was put under a magic spell. As if this wasn't creepy enough we also see her gradual body transformation into a spider!
- The guardians of the Land of the Giants in "Giants" first appear as a group of cute, fluffy puppy-like creatures. It turns out their heads are part of long stalks and their underbellies one big mouth filled with rows of sharp teeth.
- The blue plague in the eponymous "The Blue Plague". A highly contagious, incurable disease which causes its victims to die a slow and lingering death. To avoid contagion, they're thrown into a sand pit, with the only avenue of relief being a large rock, upon which the victims climb and wait to be shot to death by archers.
