Every horror comic promises to make you look at something ordinary a little differently, but I didn’t expect a three-issue miniseries to change how I feel about the biggest shopping day of the year. I finally sat down and read Black Friday in full, after finding it in my LCS, and wow, what a crazy ride.
BLACK FRIDAY
Publisher: Scout Comics (Black Caravan)
Writer: Jon Clark
Main Cover & Interior Artist: Travis Williamson
Letterer: April Brown
Release Dates: February 2021 – June 2021
This three-issue horror miniseries is written by Jon Clark and illustrated by Travis Williamson. We’d already checked out their twisted toy tale Playthings, so we were excited to see them back together for another creepy ride. In Playthings, Alison Hart wakes up inside a bright, candy-colored room to find herself tied down with licorice, surrounded by toys that move because they’re somehow alive, and her own hands no longer feeling real, all while she pieces together what happened to her missing daughter, Emma. It’s a genuinely disturbing setup, and the same unsettling creativity carries straight through to Black Friday.
Jon Clark’s other credits include Hag and Thin as writer and cover artist, and he also wrote and drew Snaps, a one-shot we absolutely loved. In Snaps, Doctor Keith Harris gets a late-night visit from his shaken childhood friend Oliver, who’s captured photographic proof that monsters invisible to the naked eye are lurking everywhere, only visible through a camera lens. That’s how you do horror, a simple premise executed with real confidence. Travis Williamson brings credits including Nun Assassin, Fat Cow, and The Importance of Being Superfluous, and letterer April Brown has worked on Only Living Boy and To End All Wars: A WW1 Graphic Anthology. Their style really clicks with Black Caravan’s brand of offbeat horror.
What Is Black Friday About?
The story takes place during the aftermath of a chaotic Black Friday sale, the actual real-world shopping holiday millions of people brave every year for a deal, which already makes for a solid premise before anything supernatural even shows up. A clean-up crew at a massive superstore is stuck dealing with more than just smashed displays and spilled coffee. Turns out, all the consumer madness has stirred something ancient and evil buried beneath the building. What starts as a typical work shift turns into a nightmare of gore, madness, and corporate secrets gone horribly wrong.
A Crazy Ride From Start to Finish
I’d never read a horror story quite like this before. The tone is genuinely weird, and I loved that we discovered the terrifying truth at the same time as the characters, there’s no omniscient narrator setting up the rules ahead of time, you’re figuring out what’s actually happening to this superstore right alongside a bunch of exhausted retail workers who were just hoping to clock out. That structure alone makes the horror feel more immediate than a lot of comics in this genre manage.
The art style took me a minute to settle into, but it completely fits the vibe of this story, once it clicks, it’s hard to imagine the book looking any other way. There’s something fitting about horror this unhinged being drawn in a style that doesn’t play it safe either. The second issue ramps up the blood and brings a totally different flavor of horror that kept me hooked, it’s the kind of shift that could easily feel jarring in a shorter miniseries, but here it works because the book has already established that nothing about this story is going to stay predictable. And by the time I reached the third issue, it was a full-on explosion of guts, dread, and a wild ending that really delivered, the kind of finale that makes the whole three-issue build actually feel earned instead of rushed.
What sticks with me most, honestly, is how well the setting does the heavy lifting. A superstore during Black Friday is already chaotic before anything supernatural gets involved, and the book leans into that instead of treating the retail backdrop as just window dressing. It’s the rare horror comic where the mundane setting and the monster feel like they actually belong to the same story.
Final Thoughts
Black Friday is available in collected format if you missed the issues. It’s definitely worth grabbing if you’re into bold, original horror, as we are!
More Wild Horror Rides
If Black Friday‘s chaos worked for you, we’ve covered a few other horror comics that go just as hard in their own weird directions. Willy’s Wonderland Prequel takes us back to the cursed beginnings of the animatronic-slasher restaurant from the Nicolas Cage film. Spectregraph follows a single mother drawn into a haunted mansion built by an occult-obsessed industrialist. And Return of the Living Dead brings back the brain-eating chaos of the 1985 cult classic with a new cast of skate punks and theme park interns.
FAQ
Is Black Friday worth reading? Yes, especially if you like your horror weird, gory, and rooted in something as mundane as a retail shift gone wrong.
Do you need to read anything before Black Friday? No. It’s a standalone three-issue miniseries with no required reading beforehand.
Who is writing and drawing Black Friday? Jon Clark writes the series, with art by Travis Williamson and letters by April Brown.
Is Black Friday a one-shot, miniseries, or ongoing series? It’s a three-issue miniseries, running from February to June 2021.
Is Black Friday available in a collected edition? Yes, it’s available in trade paperback if you missed the single issues.
