Phantom Road: A Comic for Horror Junkies

ReindeercurtOctober 27, 2026

If you’ve spent enough time exploring creepypasta, ARGs, unfiction and the other corners of the internet horror ecosystem, you’ve likely noticed some patterns in subject matter and theming. Eerie Americana, cover-ups and conspiracies, other worlds accessible through hidden and forgotten places. Some of this comes from derivation of course. The internet is more efficient at producing pulp and amateur art than any novella press or micro film studio, and pulp is identifiable by its clear, unashamed inspiration by ubiquitous reference points in pop culture. That phenomenon of remixing and ripping-off is supercharged by the way authorship rarely sticks to online content. Anything remotely popular or buzzy gets reposted endlessly without attribution, and for the enterprising horror creator, there’s really nothing stopping you from making your own Slenderman, or SCP, or Backrooms project. All you need is a grasp of the tropes, iconography and emotions at play. That anarchic quality, that superposition between insular community and Wild West free-for-all is what makes internet horror so captivating to me. Traditional media can try to capture that energy, but it rarely works because the machinery of big-budget film and television tends to produce work very different from pulp. More refined, less naked in its fixations and inspirations.

Comics, though? When I look at comics I see ideal conditions for pulp. Many have decried the rise of high-concept miniseries, the “X Meets Y” species of direct market comic. “Adaptation-bait”. “Glorified spec scripts”. For me though, I see these books as epitomizing the impulse I see in internet horror: to take popular and familiar stories and spin them, break them apart and build art that feels uniquely of-the-moment out of their composite pieces. There’s a reason, I think, that horror has been holding its own in the direct market for the past few years. A prime example of this convergent evolution: Phantom Road by Jeff Lemire, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Jordie Bellaire and Steve Wands.

Taking place on a highway in America’s flyover country, the comic incorporates a remarkable amount of the imagery and themes common in internet horror content into a story about secrets hidden in desolate, abandoned places and neglected people. Fans of Kane Parsons’ recent Backrooms film will immediately identify Phantom Road’s protagonist Dom as a familiar type: a middle-aged man drowning himself in work to distract from his broken family life. Someone watching their opportunities narrow and shutter. Dom is joined by Birdie, a young woman who we meet having just survived a car crash as the civilian perspective on our mysterious supernatural phenomenon: a desolate alternate reality dotted with the husks of manmade structures and populated by humanoid creatures that Walta renders like twisted-up clay sculptures. The pair must transport an unknown object east along the highway until they reach “Golgotha”; while in a parallel narrative thread FBI agent Theresa Weaver provides our window into the comic’s conspiratorial angle.

The other world in its appearance and in the textures of its narrative context are drawing on liminality for its horror. That endless highway under a sun that never sets, rendered in sepia ink and washed-out colours so that nothing ever feels warm or alive. The ruined truck stops and unchanging vistas stretching to the horizon in an unbroken sameness. Liminality refers to transitional spaces; passed-through but never dwelled in as a destination unto themselves. A highway and a truck stop are each liminal in their ways, and Phantom Road’s exaggerated, dreamy rendition of them resonates with the way the concept has taken on a second life on the internet. When people talk about “liminal horror”, they tend to identify it with constructed spaces which have been emptied of activity and purpose, and stretched out to senseless proportions. Infinite parking lots and dead malls and corporate storage space and public school hallways and tiled indoor pools. They induce fear through alienation; they are familiar, but abandonment and loss of context makes them strange. These are the nightmares of kids growing up amid urban decay and foreclosure of the future. They seem to promise: in the end this is all that will remain of our world. These are our ruins.

These nightmare visions of our modern constructions falling into disuse and neglect dovetail with the classic horror instinct to take something cute and family-friendly, and think, “What if that was evil?”. To that effect, the Billy Bear chain of truck stops are the access points between our world and “The Other Place” in Phantom Road, and in that Other Place waits a real, walking, talking Billy Bear. You might be thinking, “Oh, the comic is doing a Five Nights At Freddy’s riff”, but if anything Billy Bear is closer to something like the webseries “The Monument Mythos”. Because really, this is an unknowable, malicious entity wearing the shape of Billy Bear so as to appear friendly to our heroes. He fails at this naturally, and the creative team make a meal out of the absurdity of seeing a living mascot costume brutalize malformed ghoulies. It’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as people finding clowns creepy; anodyne colourful characters just seem to take on a creepy edge when you have to share physical space with them. Billy Bear offering for Birdie to join his “cub club” makes me shiver with revulsion when I read it. It’s wonderful.

Billy Bear and his provenance with the truck stop chain of the same name also sits at the center of the comic’s conspiracy plot. Agent Weaver spends the book unspooling a murder investigation into a grand cover-up of The Other Place perpetuated by the founder of Billy Bear for unknown reasons. Phantom Road is clearly drawing on occult detective fiction, and particularly titans of the genre Twin Peaks and The X-Files, and those same works have also informed many internet horror projects. This is a mode of storytelling which comes naturally to works disseminated on the internet, where authorship can be kept anonymous, and there is no differentiation between mundane posts, earnest conspiracy theorizing and fiction. The SCP Foundation is the most obvious corollary, with its para-governmental organization researching and covering up supernatural phenomena, but secret government and corporate forces hiding terrifying truths from the public is all over the place. The “lost episode” subgenre of creepypasta and the stylistic conventions of analog horror are both founded on the intrigue and taboo of finding information that someone doesn’t want you to have.

It’s clear that we’ve crossed the threshold of internet horror still being “niche”. With writers, visual artists and directors in the space like Marcus Kliewer, Trevor Henderson, Mia Goth and Kane Parsons finding success in traditional media, the ecosystem of /nosleep posters, indie game devs and amateur youtube filmmakers has the spotlight right now. People are noticing that there’s gold to be mined here, and while it remains to be seen whether this process will be symbiotic or extractive, it makes me want to step back and re-examine the art that straddles the line between these two worlds. Phantom Road is one such work; which seems to have arrived at all the same symbols and emotions without having been influenced directly by anything in the internet horror scene. All the anxieties about our lives in the modern day, and what we’ll leave behind in the future; about institutions keeping us in the dark about the dangers which we can’t see, these are all as potent in Lemire and Walta’s story as they are when refracted through the thousand voices of amateur creators online. If you’re an internet horror junkie like I am, and you’re curious about the world of horror comics, Phantom Road should be the perfect Halloween read.