Some horror comics want to scare you. Crossed wants to find out how much you can take. Launched by writer Garth Ennis and artist Jacen Burrows through Avatar Press in 2008, it has a reputation that walks into the room before it does. It’s the comic even hardened horror fans warn each other about. Mention it in a comic shop and you’ll get the same look every time, the one that says “you sure about that?”
But here’s the thing: strip away the reputation and there’s a genuinely sharp, deeply uncomfortable piece of writing underneath, one that asks questions most horror is too polite to ask. So I’m going to count down thirteen dark and disturbing facts about Crossed, from the ground rules to the big idea that Ennis leaves us with, without wallowing in the stuff that made it infamous.
Anyway, let’s get stuck in.
#13. The Rules
Forget everything you know about zombies. The Crossed aren’t dead, they aren’t slow, and they aren’t stupid. The infection, marked by a cross-shaped rash spreading across the face, doesn’t rot the brain. It flips a switch. Every restraint, every scrap of empathy, every “I’d never do that” gets turned off, while everything else stays online. That means The Crossed can drive, they can talk, and when they talk they never shut up.
They can use guns, lay ambushes, bait traps with fake cries for help, and work together when it suits them. They remember who you were and use it against you. A zombie is a force of nature: you can predict it, outsmart it, wall it out. Which makes The Crossed worse than any zombie infestation because they’re still clever and amidst that cleverness lies a homicidal maniac with zero empathy.
#12. C-Day
Most outbreak stories love their first act. The lab leak, the scientist who saw it coming, the news anchor stammering through a breaking report, the hero slowly realising something is very wrong. The original series skips all of it. There’s no patient zero, no shady corporation, no government cover-up waiting to be exposed. There’s just one ordinary day, where people start turning, and then within hours civilisation is simply gone. Fans call it C-Day. It happens, it’s over, and the survivors are left picking up the pieces.
Ennis isn’t interested in the how, because the how would give you something to hold onto. An explanation implies a cause, a cause implies a cure, and a cure implies hope. By refusing to explain this hopelessness, the original takes away the comfort of a puzzle to solve. Years later, however, Ennis’s Badlands arc “The Thin Red Line” traced a patient zero to a Yorkshire village, and even that answer raised more questions than it settled. But in the book that started it all, the world didn’t end for a reason. It just ended. And that’s what makes it so terrifying.
#11. No Heroes
This is where Crossed earns its reputation for nihilism. Most apocalypse fiction keeps a light at the end of the tunnel: a cure in development, a fortified city, a crackly radio signal promising safety somewhere north. Crossed dangles those things in front of its characters and then quietly takes them away. Safe zones fall. Clever plans fail because of one bad break, one moment of hesitation, one person who can’t keep their nerve. Good people die, and surviving one comic book story is no guarantee of surviving the next. There’s no chosen one, no grizzled leader who holds it all together, no final stand that turns the tide.
#10. The Laugh
If you remember one thing about the Crossed, make it this: it’s the laugh. It’s the detail that gets under your skin long after the scenes of brutal savagery end. The kind that makes the Joker’s laugh crawl into a cave, and hide from the world as it waits to die. The Crossed are delighted in the suffering of others. It gets them off. In fact, in one scene, Joel, who believes The Crossed are allergic to salt, pours a circle of salt around him and his family as they fall behind the rest of the group.
This amuses the Crossed who find Joel, his wife and their daughter in this predicament. Resulting in a scene of Joel and his wife being sexually assaulted, Joel disemboweled as he’s taking it up the arse from one of the Crossed, and their daughter being hacked apart by a meat cleaver. The Crossed giggle, crack jokes, make terrible puns, and treat cruelty like the ultimate punchline.
#9. The First Volume
Everything starts with the original ten-issue run by Ennis and Burrows, and it’s still the purest version of the idea. It’s narrated by Stan, a drifter who happens to be in a small-town diner when C-Day hits, and who’s saved by Cindy, the diner’s tough-as-nails waitress, who becomes the group’s leader. Around them gathers a small band of survivors, including Kelly, blinded in the first hours, and Thomas, who looks after her.
Ten months on, their plan is simple: head for Alaska, where a sparse population should mean fewer Crossed. What follows is a grim road trip. The group shrinks, the rules harden, and with every passing mile, each of them loses a part of their humanity. Ennis keeps the focus tight on these few people and the slow cost of staying alive, which makes every loss land harder than any splash page could.
#8. Family Values
Written by David Lapham, Crossed: Family Values takes the horror somewhere even more uncomfortable: home. It centres on the Pratt family, devout and close-knit, living on a North Carolina ranch when the outbreak hits. On paper they’re exactly who you’d bet on to survive. They’re self-sufficient, armed, and organised around a strong father figure. The story slowly reveals that the real threat isn’t only the Crossed beyond the fence.
It’s the rot inside the house and what one man will do to keep control once the old world’s rules disappear. The daughter at the centre of the story faces choices no one should have to make, about loyalty, about escape, and about what she owes the people who raised her.
#7. Badlands
The ongoing anthology that launched in 2012 and ran for 100 issues, Crossed: Badlands handed the keys to a psychopathic kingdom of writers including Ennis himself, David Lapham, Si Spurrier, Kieron Gillen and Jamie Delano. Each arc takes place in somewhere new: a different country, a different moment after C-Day, and a different group of doomed people.
Some are war stories, some are survival thrillers, and some are character studies where the Crossed barely appear. But while the tones of each story vary wildly, the misery of a post-Crossed world certainly doesn’t. That’s what makes Badlands so fascinating. It proves that the world itself is the main character, and every writer who walked into it found the same thing waiting: ordinary people, pushed to the edge, deciding who they really are.
#6. Psychopath
Crossed: Psychopath is another David Lapham story and it flips the formula in the nastiest way possible. Its lead, Harold Lorre, isn’t infected. He’s something arguably worse: a man who was already dangerous before the world ended and sees the apocalypse as an opportunity. Found starving and injured in the desert, Harold wins over a band of survivors by promising to lead them to safety and a cure, then quietly picks them off one by one, passing each killing off as the work of the Crossed.
The genius, and the horror, is that he genuinely believes he’s the good guy. In his head he’s a protector, a romantic, and a misunderstood hero. But the reader sees him for what he truly is. Which turns every page into a slow, sickening dramatic irony.
#5. Alan Moore’s + One Hundred
In 2014, the famed Watchmen writer took on Crossed + One Hundred, a six-issue series with art by Gabriel Andrade that jumps a full century past C-Day. In this dark future humanity hasn’t recovered. Survivors live in small rebuilt settlements like Chooga in Tennessee, socially and technologically set back by generations. As a result, even language has drifted, and Moore invents a whole future slang that readers have to decode as they go.
The lead character, Future Taylor, is an archivist leading a salvage team through the ruins to piece together the lost past. To her generation the Crossed are history, seen only on old video, until a handful turn up alive and a century-old plan starts to surface. It’s a fun take on Ennis’s morally bankrupt universe and, equally, is an interesting exploration for horror fans who love a morsel of science fiction. It’s world-building first and horror second, treating the apocalypse less as an event and more as a long, oppressive aftermath.
#4. The Satire and the Art
Underneath the shock value, Crossed is often laughing at something. Ennis has spent his career taking aim at institutions, and Christianity bears the full brunt of his commentary. The infection brands people with a cross, and keeps circling back to faiths that offer no real protection. Believers who fare no better than anyone else. And the uneasy idea that moral codes collapse fast when nobody’s watching. The military, a long-time Ennis subject, and the whole survival-movie genre, with its battle hardened heroes and last-minute rescues, gets turned inside out.
There’s also a fair case that Crossed is a jab at the cape crowd: a world where nobody gets powers, nobody swoops in to save the day, and strength makes no case for guaranteed survival. Artist Jacen Burrows has said drawing this darkness was never the hard part. It was the grind of time and detail to communicate the terror of the characters living in an endless nightmare. The believable faces, crowds and ruined streets page after page would’ve really taken its toll. But despite the savagery, Burrows has said his craft secret is restraint because sometimes the scariest moments are the ones left off the page.
#3. The slow and methodical Annihilation of Ennis’s Characters
Let’s go back to the initial Crossed volume for a moment. Because, while the fear and panic that Cindy, Stan and the rest of the group feel is very real to them. None of their fears are quite as grim as the gradual annihilation of their characters. Stan starts off as the optimistic narrator of the series who falls in love with Cindy and, after repeated rejection, shoots another survivor in the head for kicking his dog. Cindy’s son gets separated from the group while they’re being pursued by a gang of Crossed and is eventually turned himself, forcing her to shoot him.
Geoff, the older father-figure of the group, is revealed to be a serial killer. Kitrick, a cop, watches his wife get decapitated and the murder of his two children on C-Day. He kills a kindergarten teacher, kills Geoff for being a serial killer and eventually sacrifices himself in a scene which turns out to be a meaningless death which solves nothing. Then Kelly and Thomas, the ones we come to care so much about, plunge to their deaths rather than be murdered by a group of Crossed. This is Garth Ennis at his most brutal. Destroying everything that we come to care about. It’s a nihilist’s masturbatory wet-dream.
#2. Why It Couldn’t Be Adapted (Until Now)
With zombies infecting TV and superheroes owning the box office, why hasn’t Crossed been adapted into live action? Probably because no studio in its right mind would touch it and probably because in order to do it justice it would mean the show or movie would have to be, at minimum, R rated. Strip out what makes the Crossed so extreme and you’re left with fast murderers who tell jokes. So it went indie.
In 2024, Six Studios optioned the original ten issues with Ennis writing the script, and The Sadness director Rob Jabbaz signed on in 2025 promising a faithful adaptation. It was shot in just 21 days on a modest budget, wrapped in July 2025, and in the past week – a haunting poster has been leaked for the whole world to see. That’s what “too far” really means here: the only way to make Crossed was small, cheap and far from the reach of shareholders. Whether it ends up being as extreme as the source material is the question fans are eagerly waiting for an answer to.
#1. The Point of Crossed
Here’s the fact that makes Crossed genuinely disturbing rather than just gross: it was never really about the infected. The Crossed are a mirror. They do what they want, when they want, with no consequences and no conscience. And the longer you read, the clearer it becomes that the survivors aren’t as different from them as they’d like to believe. Without police, laws, neighbours or reputations to protect, ordinary people start making choices that would’ve been unthinkable a week earlier. They lie, steal, abandon and justify their actions.
Like when Cindy and Stan decide that murdering a bunch of 8-year-olds is the best answer instead of working out how they can look after them. That’s the real horror Ennis is selling. Not that civilisation can fall in an afternoon, but that so much of our goodness might depend on what consequences civilisation will subject you to. Take away those consequences, and what’s actually left? Everyone has dark thoughts. Everyone has impulses they’d never admit to out loud. So – what would you act on if you knew you’d definitely get away with it?
Outro
Anyway, that’s it for now. Please like and subscribe. Let me know in the comments if there’s any dark or disturbing comics you’d like me to cover. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Until then, I’ll see you guys next time. For the next List of the Damned.
