Overview

Black Comedy is when disturbing, serious, and/or taboo things are written in comical way that is designed to make the audience laugh, disturbed, sickened, and/or think about a subject more seriously than they would normally. Black Comedy is used to make light of subjects such as murder, war, genocide, Armageddon, rape, suicide, torture, disability, drug use, domestic violence, animal abuse, incest, corruption, crime, as well as any other serious, taboo, or disturbing subjects.

Black Comedy in comics is not limited to strictly realistic type comic books and stories. Black Comedy has been used in science fiction. One example of this is alien invasions showing aliens committing genocide in comical manner. In alternate worlds dictators using torture to keep the citizens in line while having the story written in a way to make the reader sympathize with the tyrant and/or laugh at what he does.

In horror comics black comedy can be used to make fun of things that are particularly gruesome and disturbing for most audiences. Such as monsters murdering a character in manner that makes the reader laugh and happy to see since the character was written in a deliberately annoying fashion; or making demonic possession appear to be comical even though the character is going insane and/or losing their soul because of the demon.