‘Basketful of Heads’ and the compelling horror of decapitation
The comics series Basketful of Heads features protagonist June Branch as she attempts to defend herself and rescue her boyfriend from nefarious assailants; armed with a mysterious magic axe that allows her to behead her adversaries in a single stroke while keeping the heads cognizant and talking, June struggles to solve the mystery of her boyfriend’s disappearance, getting information from a growing collection of decapitated heads that she keeps in a basket and covers with a torn American flag. Basketful of Heads benefits from its intriguing characters and secrets, and the comic’s suspense is enhanced by the compelling horror of decapitation.
Written by Joe Hill and illustrated by artist Leomacs with colorist Dave Stewart, Basketful of Heads is set in the year 1983, in the small community of Brody Island, Maine. College student June visits the island to meet her boyfriend Liam Ellsworth as he finishes his summer job serving as a deputy to police chief Wade Clausen. The day June arrives, four male convicts escape from a local prison. Despite Liam’s offer to help, Clausen insists that Liam and June join his wife and son for dinner while he searches for the fugitives. June meets the Clausen family at their home, and is shown Chief Clausen’s collection of Viking antiques, including an 8th century axe.
Later that evening, as a tropical storm hits the island, Liam and June watch the house alone while the Clausen family runs an errand; then the convicts show up, breaking into the house. June hides and is later found by a convict, who tells her that Liam has been taken away by the other convicts. To defend herself, June grabs the axe; in the ensuing confrontation, June discovers the axe’s power when she decapitates her assailant.
The comic establishes June as a captivating protagonist, and builds suspense through the mystery of Liam’s abduction, the isolation of Brody Island during the tropical storm, and the threat of the convicts, who are not what they appear to be. But the comic’s horror comes from the unsettling decapitations resulting from the axe’s supernatural powers.
Both June and the decapitated convict struggle to understand what has happened. Readers see panels depicting an upside down June alongside a headless body, as Leomacs renders the viewpoint of the convict’s severed — but still conscious — head. The convict is both terrified and confused, and June is in shock. Later, June cuts off the head of another assailant, who screams inexorably as he tries to process what has happened to him.
Readers will likely find the talking severed heads depicted in the comic quite macabre. The heads are both fascinating and gruesome, and readers may even feel some sympathy for the axe’s loathsome victims, who were menacing antagonists before June swung the axe. The emotional uneasiness generated by the depiction of severed heads is hardwired into human beings; readers’ discomfort is a natural response to the decapitation imagery.
Anthropologist Frances Larson documents the cross-cultural human fascination with decapitated heads in her book, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found; Larson notes that human biology compels a strong emotional reaction to a severed head:
“We cannot confront another person’s head without sharing an understanding: face to face, we are peering into ourselves. We are hard-wired to react to a person’s facial expression, spontaneously and unconsciously. We experience an automatic and rapid neurological response to seeing a sad, happy, angry or distressed face which causes us, unconsciously, to mimic its expression. When it is the face of a bodiless head, our physical reflex — that instinctive empathy — conflicts with the knowledge that this person must be dead. After all, what is missing is as important as what remains, and the person’s lost body is as compelling in its absence as the head is absent in its presence.”
Larson also explores the history of fantasy tales featuring severed heads that live on after decapitation, like the “head in a jar” trope found in science fiction stories. Larson traces this concept back to the invention of the guillotine; the mechanism was so swift, observers wondered whether cognizance might persist in the moments right after decapitation, leading to stories like this one:
“During the Revolution, rumours spread of guillotined heads that lived on without their bodies. When the severed heads of two rival members of the National Assembly were placed in the same sack by the executioner, it was said that one bit the other so fiercely it was impossible to separate them.”
(Note the similarities between this gruesome 18th century guillotine story and the first page of Basketful of Heads #1, depicting a quarrelsome conversation between severed heads, as one bites the other.)
Basketful of Heads is the newest story in a rich history of tales featuring decapitation, but is distinctive for its female protagonist. June evolves over several issues from a threatened character protected by her boyfriend into a strong protagonist on a rescue quest. The axe’s supernatural power gives June the ability to accomplish the physically difficult act of decapitation with ease, and June’s role as a heroine beheading male antagonists is noteworthy.
In Severed, Larson examines Western depictions of females beheading men, particularly the biblical figures of Salome and Judith. Both women use sexual charm in the service of decapitating their male enemies; Salome manipulates King Herod into killing John the Baptist, while Judith, hoping to save Israel, seduces the Assyrian general Holofernes so that she may cut off his head when he falls into a drunken slumber:
“A sense of intimacy unites the stories of Salome and Judith. Both women are consistently shown handling a severed head; Judith cuts one off with her bare hands. Before the executioner’s axe and the guillotine’s blade, severed heads were necessarily intimate objects. Women who handled heads, who sliced men’s necks, were mythologized as seductive almost by necessity. They might not be able to overpower a man by brute force, but they could disarm him with their beauty.
The opportunity to contrast a beautiful woman with a dead man’s head ensured that both Judith and Salome appeared in works of art throughout the Renaissance: Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Donatello all conjured Judith; for the first she was elegant, for the second she was bloody, for the third, victorious.”
Like Judith, June is a rare heroine empowered to dominate her male enemies through decapitation. Because the heads remain cognizant after beheading, June has power over her decapitated antagonists, able to slap, pinch, interrogate, and transport the heads of her adversaries without physical resistance.
In addition to decapitation, dismemberment of other body parts, specifically hands and arms, is a visual theme of Basketful of Heads: each issue begins with a credits page depicting severed arms in a basket; Liam’s severed finger is discovered by June at the Clausen home; the watch hands of Liam’s wristwatch are in the shape of bodiless, cartoonish human hands pointing to the hours and minutes, and the visual of a watch face with these hands appears throughout the narrative to update readers on the story’s time frame.
These renderings of dismembered body parts add to the comic’s gruesome terror and suspense, and, like the talking decapitated heads, are uncomfortable to behold.
The first issue of Basketful of Heads was published in October 2019, the debut issue of DC Comics’ horror imprint Hill House Comics; the imprint, curated by Hill, would expand to include other titles: The Dollhouse Family, The Low, Low Woods, Daphne Byrne, and Plunge. Hill’s decision to launch a horror imprint with a comic showcasing decapitation was an excellent choice, as even past critics of horror comics recognized the emotional power of decapitation imagery.
It was likely no accident that savvy politician Estes Kefauver — a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee holding televised public hearings in April 1954 to investigate the alleged impact comic books had in causing juvenile delinquency — highlighted the cover of publisher EC Comics’ Crime SuspenStories #22 in order to question the tastes and artistic merits of horror comics. Of all the gruesome covers that Kefauver could have selected, the senator chose the one that depicted a severed female head to make his point.
The cover image helped Kefauver and his allies’ efforts to condemn horror comics; under intense public pressure, the comics industry curtailed the publication of horror comics, and the genre languished for decades. Whether intentional or not, the decapitation premise of Basketful of Heads— utilized in a comics series that launched a modern horror imprint — is a fitting creative retort to past critics who used decapitation imagery as an argument for censoring comics.
Basketful of Heads makes great use of our strong, innate emotional reaction to depictions of decapitation; combined with intriguing characters and a suspenseful plot delivered by a talented creative team, the comic’s gruesome decapitations are a compelling feature of the horror series.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING — The author references the following sources in the above article:
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (Frances Larson, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014) — this excellent exploration of the human fascination with severed heads and skulls is highly recommended.
“The Horror: Congress investigates the comics” (Louis Menand, The New Yorker, March 24, 2008) — in his discussion of author David Hajdu’s book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Menand recounts Estes Kefauver’s questioning of EC Comics publisher William Gaines, and Kefauver’s effective use of the decapitation cover for Crime SuspenStories #22.
Basketful of Heads (written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Leomacs, colored by Dave Stewart, lettered by Deron Bennett, edited by Mark Doyle and Amedeo Turturro; DC Comics, 2019-2020) — issues one through four were published at the time of this article, with the series expected to conclude by issue seven.
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