In the annals of extreme horror comics, few titles carry the radioactive weight of Garth Ennis’s Crossed. Debuting in 2008, the series presented a brutal, relentless apocalypse: a virus that strips humans of their inhibitions and morality, turning them into sadistic, cunning “Crossed” who exist only to inflict pain. For years, the franchise traded on shock and immediacy—the terror of the first week, the fire of the collapse.
Then, in 2014, Alan Moore did the unthinkable. He looked away from the explosion and stared directly into the long, cold shadow it cast. The result, Crossed +100, is not just the best book in the franchise; it’s a masterclass in post-apocalyptic world-building that asks a question no one else dared to: What happens to trauma after a century?
When readers locate a copy of Crossed 1 comic, they are buying into four specific sequences that have become legendary (or infamous) in comic history.
The Opening Salvo: The issue opens in medias res with Salt and a female survivor named Cindy fleeing through a forest. There is no slow build. We are dropped into the apocalypse. The first panel of a Crossed victim is a close-up of a man holding his own severed ear. Ennis and artist Jacen Burrows waste no time; they declare war on the reader's comfort immediately. crossed 1 comic
The Supermarket Flashback: Through flashback, we see the initial outbreak. A man in a supermarket turns, smashes a jar of mayonnaise, and uses the glass shard to carve the cross into his cheeks while screaming about "the wickedness." Burrows’ art here is clinical. He draws the act of self-mutilation with the cold precision of a medical textbook. This is not cartoony violence; it is hyper-realistic.
The "Cattle Truck" Scene: This is the sequence that defines the Crossed 1 comic in the minds of collectors. Salt and Cindy hide in the back of a cattle truck only to discover several Crossed victims are already there—specifically, a man and a woman who have "turned" but haven't yet killed each other. What follows is a rape, a murder, and a dismemberment happening in the dark, cramped space of a livestock trailer. The dialogue—"It won't bring the baby back, will it?"—is haunting not for the gore, but for the nihilistic resignation.
The Motel Standoff: The final act of Crossed #1 sees the survivors hiding in a motel bathroom while a pack of Crossed—led by a sadistic ex-counselor—bangs on the door. The tension is unbearable because the Crossed are not stupid. They negotiate, they lie, they promise to "be quick." The issue ends on a cliffhanger that feels hopeless. There is no victory in Crossed #1. Only survival for a few more pages. In the annals of extreme horror comics, few
The genius of Crossed +100 (set, as the title suggests, 100 years after "Crossed +1"—the day the first infected appeared) is its language. Moore, working with artist Gabriel Andrade, introduces a future dialect of English. Characters speak in a compressed, linguistic shorthand born from isolation and the loss of media, education, and context. “Future” becomes “futch.” “Probably” is “probly.” They refer to the original Crossed outbreak as “the surfacing.”
This isn’t a gimmick. It’s archaeology. The fractured grammar reveals a fractured psyche. These are people who have never known a world without the Crossed. The horror of the original comics—the visceral, screaming terror of being eaten alive—is for them history. Legend. The survivors in Crossed +100 don’t flinch at gore; they’re bored by it. Their horror is existential: they fear losing the memory of what sanity was.
The issue opens with the pandemic’s rapid spread and societal breakdown. Ennis follows several characters—most notably survivors confronted with both infected and opportunistic other humans—showing immediate violence, despair, and attempts at survival. The narrative juxtaposes ordinary domestic settings against sudden, grotesque brutality, ending with scenes that foreground horror and loss of civil order. The genius of Crossed +100 (set, as the
Jacen Burrows’ linework is clean yet clinical, amplifying shock through contrast: mundane settings rendered precisely, then fractured by gruesome events. Panel composition emphasizes sudden intrusion—close-ups on faces, fragmented layouts—creating intimacy with victims and offenders alike. Color palette (muted with sudden bright reds) accentuates blood and the titular crosses.
To understand Crossed #1, you must first understand the rules of its universe. Unlike zombies (slow or fast), the "Crossed" are not mindless. They are infected by a pathogen (airborne, bloodborne—the ambiguity adds to the terror) that strips away every layer of human empathy, conscience, and restraint.
The infected develop a red, cross-shaped rash on their faces—hence the name. But the physical transformation is irrelevant compared to the psychological one. The Crossed retain their intelligence, memories, and motor skills. They can talk, set traps, drive cars, and use weapons. But they are enslaved by a singular, maddening desire: to inflict the maximum amount of suffering possible before they die.
This is not a plague of hunger; it is a plague of hate.
In the first few pages of Crossed #1, Ennis establishes the collapse of the world through the eyes of our protagonist, a hardened, pragmatic Brit named Salt. We witness the "turn"—normal people suddenly scratching the cross into their faces with broken glass and turning on their families. The horror of Crossed is not the monster; it is the sudden realization that the monster is still your neighbor, your spouse, or your child, laughing while they torture you.