Poison-Creadted by:Dark Box

This is a short, pastel-colored psychological horror comic told almost entirely through images and a few captions.

A young boy lives with his father and his new stepmother (a woman with short blue hair). At first everything seems normal: there are happy family photos, the adults smile a lot, and they tell the boy they just want everyone to get along.

But the boy quickly realizes something is deeply wrong. His stepmother and father constantly pressure him to drink certain liquids (shown as bottles labeled “poison” or “aphrodisiac” in his frightened imagination). Whenever he refuses or hesitates, they become menacing. He starts sneaking around the house at night, spying on them, hiding bottles, and trying to protect himself. He discovers old photos and realizes his real mother (a gentle-looking woman with long black hair) disappeared under mysterious circumstances years earlier.

The tension builds: the stepmother keeps preparing suspicious drinks, the father forces the boy to “be nice” to her, and the boy grows more and more paranoid and sleep-deprived. He finds an old wedding photo where the stepmother looks exactly the same age she does now, even though many years have passed.

Eventually the boy can’t take it anymore and tries to run away or fight back, but he’s too small and exhausted. In the final pages we see the truth: the “stepmother” is actually the vengeful spirit of the boy’s real mother. Years ago, the father and his new girlfriend got rid of the original wife so they could be together. The real mother came back as a ghost, slowly tormenting and destroying the replacement family from the inside. The drinks she kept offering weren’t meant to harm the boy; they were meant to make the stepmother suffer the same fate she once did.

The last panels show the boy kneeling at a grave marked “Stella 1983-2017” (his real mother), finally understanding that everything the ghost did was to protect him and punish the people who took her place. The “happy” family photos on the wall now feel hollow and mocking. The cycle of quiet, domestic revenge is complete, and the boy is left alone with the truth.

The horror lies in the slow realization that the person you feared most was actually trying to save you all along, while the people who smiled in the photographs were the real monsters.