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Writing about Neonomicon and Alan Moore’s infernal worlds of words the other day brought to mind an earlier, far more controversial adventure in horror comics: 1989’s notorious Taboo 2, edited by Stephen R. Bissette and dogged by all manner of production difficulties chiefly related to finding people willing to physically assemble the finished volume. Two printers, two copy shops, nine binders, a typesetting house and a color separation outfit all declined to handle the material, and then portions of the print run were seized by Canadian and UK customs. Looking at it today, the anthology mostly seems distinctly catholic in its approach to horror, blending art by S. Clay Wilson, Eddie Campbell, Richard Sala, Michael Zulli, Rick Grimes and Bernie Mireault, to say nothing of the auspicious debut of the new Alan Moore-written horror serial From Hell.

But the entry that’s stayed with me — and provides a fascinating link to Moore’s later horror work with Avatar — is Sweet Nothings, a 16-page story from writer Tim Lucas, best known as a writer-on-movies-on-home-video and eventual editor/publisher of Video Watchdog, and Belgrade-born artist Simonida Perica-Uth, making her comics debut. Lucas had begun work on Throat Sprockets, a Mike Hoffman-drawn comics serial in the prior Taboo, but eventually reworked it into a 1994 prose novel; its plot saw a man developing a fixation on women’s throats after viewing a strange fetish movie, a disease-of-image scenario not unlike the Lovecraft language whispered to one Agent Sax in Neonomicon prelude The Courtyard, opening his senses to the true nature of existence in a world of allusion.

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