Nightmare Fuel / Tex Willer

• What Tex did to Fred Brennan, the last survivor of the gang that caused a smallpox epidemics among the Navajos, killing Tex's wife in the process. After isolating him on his own floating casino, Tex had him wake up in the middle of the night at the cries of people scared by smallpox, placed a skeleton at the rudder to get him even more terrified when he tried to investigate who was shouting, set the ship on fire (at this point Tex's pards were wondering if he was overdoing it), and then sank it in an area filled with sharks.
  • Tex's whole Roaring Rampage of Revenge, when you think it through: Tex is the Fastest Gun in the West and a Scarily Competent Tracker, and was at his most furious. The lucky ones, that Tex couldn't afford to torture as he wished, got shot. The unlucky one, Higgins (the guy who delivered the infected blankets that caused the epidemics), was forced to walk in the desert until midday with the head uncovered, beat up within an inch of his life, and then left there to die.
  • And the epidemics itself. It's not shown, but the idea that someone would do something like that just to kill one man...
• Padma's illusion attack on Mefisto, including having him attacked and swarmed over by dragons, serpents, mice, large spiders and other unpleasants critters until he's gone completely insane. Good Is Not Nice indeed.
  • The worst part? That's him holding back: before dealing with Mefisto he had asked to a mystic force if he was allowed to kill Mefisto and was told no, implying he can force people to just drop dead.
• Hamatsa, the Cannibal God. A giant who demands women to 'marry' (i.e. eat) from the Kuchtaqa people, who conducts raids on other tribes to procure them. Sure, in the end it's revealed as a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax from the Kuchtaqa chief when Tex shoots the guys moving it, but the thing was horrifical.
  • Then the implications of Hamatsa being a hoax and demanding specifically beautiful women hit you, and the horror is back at full force.
• The green stones that are seen in "El Morisco". At first they just seem small green pebbles of vulcanic rock. Then you notice the Bitter Almonds smell and the fact they shine in the dark, but it could mean anything. Then someone touches them... And that someone is completely dried up in mere seconds. This gave nightmares even to people who had already faced Mefisto.
  • The same story arc tops it with the Master of the Green Stones, the guy who actually recovers them from lava for use by a group of Aztec descendants planning to restore the Aztec Empire. He lived so long in the grotto where they were located that he's dried up himself, but still walks. Thankfully he's usually covered in a leather tunic and hood, but when he lowers the hood to shoot those stones at Tex and Carson the sight froze them in horror.
• The story of Randy "Lucky" Rogers shows just how scary Tex can be. Rogers was a bandit known for his enormous luck, who was captured by Tex and his pards after a gunfight that saw his gang completely exterminated. As the judge owed money to some friends of him, Rogers was aquitted... And saw Tex waiting for him out of the tribunal. And in the saloons. And on the roads. Everywhere. Eventually the gang he had joined got fed up with him seeing Tex everywhere and tried to kill him, but Rogers, still being a lucky badass, managed to kill them all while getting wounded to death, with Tex showing up and telling him he would finally leaving him alone... Except it was an hallucination. Tex drove him to madness by showing up once after their initial encounter, or possibly just by that initial encounter (it's not clear if he was waiting for him outside the tribunal or that was the first hallucination).
• Prince Sumankan, the Black Tiger, is made of this, making him the only villain that could compete with Mefisto in scariness... And he needs no magic powers for it:
  • His Origin Story: he was a Bornese prince dispossessed by the white people, who took piracy to try and retake his kingdom of Tuamantung, and after his ship was sunk he was rescued by an American ship... And promptly forced to go to America and work as a slave in all but name to build a railway. And then, as he worked as a slave, learned English and the American laws and customs well enough to pass himself as a lawyer, blew up a train to steal the pay money for the white workers, and left with his fellow slaves.
    • Fun fact: when he tells Tex his story he explicitly says that his pirate crew was composed by Dayaks, also known as head hunters because of their habit of cutting heads for a number of reasons, including wooing a woman. And while he doesn't say it beyond declaring his Bornese origins, Sumankan himself is almost certainly a Dayak.
  • His master plan: use secret organizations, a few carefully placed murders and a complacent lawyer (or himself passing himself as a lawyer) to economically take over town after town until he practically owns the United States, and then do to the Americans what the white people did to him. But that's not the scary part, the scary part is that it works, and it's only through bad luck that he's stopped in time.
    • The fact that taking over the US isn't the main goal of the plan. The main goal is to raise money to buy weapons and arm his loyalists still fighting to retake Tuamantung, everything else is a side benefit.
  • About the well-placed murders... His men can murder almost anyone pretty much anywhere, no matter what precautions are taken to stop them. They'll even tell them early, and then deliver.
  • To make his plans work he needs some white men as pawns. But what if they try and betray him? Easy: he has his men claw them to death. Even Tex was horrified by that death, and he's used to Mefisto's horrors, and one of his pawns, as terrified by Tex as he was, decided that he'd rather face him than even be suspected of such intentions.
  • Morel, another of Sumankan's pawns, decided to sell the Black Tiger to Tex in exchange for his life and a shorter prison term, and went to plot with Madison, the organization's lawyer. Who is actually one of Sumankan's disguises, something Morel learns only when Madison walks out and then comes back in his full Black Tiger get-up ready to have him murdered. He can be anywhere anytime, and you won't realize it even if you're talking to him. The fact the Black Tiger often makes appearances wearing his rajah clothes and a large black tiger mask helps the disguise.
  • In his second appearance, Sumankan steals a trick from Mephisto and allies himself with a Voodoo cult, promising his members revenge against the white men... And one of his new allies can raise dozens of zombies. Tex and his pards find this out when they're in a graveyard and every body suddenly comes up and attack.
  • Eventually Tex and Sumankan have a Duel to the Death, that ends with Sumalkan falling off a cliff in a cave. Knowing who they're dealing with, Tex and his allies recover the body to make sure he was dead... But when San Francisco's coroner started the autopsy and removed the mask they found a Chinese man: one of Sumalkan's subordinates had arrived first, saved his master, and left another man with the same corporature and Sumalkan's clothes to gain enough time to escape.
  • Eventually the chase for Sumankan resumes, with Tex and his pards trying to cut him off with a warship before he can go back to Borneo to lead the fight... And the Black Tiger's ship suddenly tries and ram Tex': they had chased one of his decoys, who had orders to ram the ship to kill Tex or at least stop the chase. And the explosion of the Black Tiger's ship damages the warship enough to stop them.
  • Thanks to Montales' help they manage to give chase anyway, following him from New Orleans to Nicaragua to try and stop him before he can embark for Borneo. While the others try to find Sumankan's other ship, Kit befriends Daniel Silva, the young captain of a Portuguese ship and accepts a drink from him... And wakes up on the ship, as Daniel is Sumankan's son. And now the Black Tiger has a hostage.
  • Still chasing Sumankan to both arrest him and rescue Kit, Tex, Carson, and Tiger Jack arrive to Tuamantung, and make a horrifying discovery: the white rajah Van Gulik is objectively even more ruthless and cruel than Sumankan, without any of his redeeming qualities, especially not his restraint. At the very least, Sumankan was never random in his cruelty and reserved it for his enemies, and was in fact a just and fair ruler, if capable of extreme cruelty.
• From the issue "Mefisto's Triumph", the titular event: with his powers on the fritz due Narbas, the man whose body he had stolen to come back to life, having escaped from hell and being in the same cave and knowing that Tex was literally seconds away from shooting him, Mefisto resorted to the most desperate solution he could, namely making an explicit Deal with the Devil (something he would normally not do due knowing the price of failing to deliver his part)... By offering him the souls of everyone else in the cave, all his enemies, in exchange for unleashing a horde of demon in the cave and kill everyone else, thus allowing the devil to claim his reward as he rendered the service. The horde is unleashed, Tex and his friends are powerless to stop the demons from killing them all... And then the devil asks Mefisto if he enjoyed the illusion: Narbas had reclaimed his body just as Mefisto was summoning them, so he only got the illusion of the deal before being Dragged Off to Hell.
  • And then Fridge Horror comes into effect when one realizes this isn't the first time Mefisto tried the same trick, or that the first time it was planned on a much larger scale: at the end of the "Tragedy in the Jungle" storyline Mefisto knew that Tex and the entirety of the Seminoles were marching on his base, and while he was in a castle there were too few defenders to stop them and thus he told his accomplice Jean de Lafayette he was going to resort to terrible magics he never dared to use before. The reason he failed that time was that Tex, knowing he was going to deal with a stone castle, had taken care of procuring the help and artillery of the US Army, who nailed the castle's powder magazine and blew it up right as Mefisto was preparing his rite.
• Every time the American Civil War enters a storyline, horror follows it:
  • Tex didn't want to get involved in the impending conflict, he and his friend "Damned" Dick just wanted to sell their cattle at Wichita in Kansas alongside their friend Rob Vergil and get the hell away from the war before it started... But war were declared while they were still in Texas, Vergil took his third of the herd to sell it early and enroll with the Confederates, and the merchant he sold it decided he could make a steal and sent the Texan militia to drag Tex and Dick, force them to sell him the cattle at a pittance, and then forcibly recruit them. This was just the start of the experience, and of the events that resulted in Tex and Carson enrolling with a Kentucky (Union) regiment.
  • Tex and Dick were at Shiloh for the entire horrific battle... And to top it off, they found Rob's body among the Confederate dead. They swore on his grave to not kill another Confederate soldier.
  • The persecution of the pro-Union German Texans at the hands of the Partisan Rangers and the Haengenbande - descriptive nickname that translates as "Hangmen Gang". Tex and Dick, sent in mission to see if it was possible to start an insurrection, worked with the Pinkerton woman Kate Warne and Kit Carson, in mission from Sam Houston to save them, to get everyone to Mexico, but part of the group, including one of Tex' childhood friends, was caugh by the Rangers and murdered in the Nueces Massacre.
  • The post war Confederate guerrillas, that used the war as an excuse to become bandits.
  • Years after the war various areas in Virginia started seeing armed robberies from a surprisingly well-organized and well-armed gang. Then one of the gang members was caught and identified as a former Confederate officers, and between that and the locals refusing to help the authorities finding them said authorities realized it wasn't just a gang, but an actual attempt at restarting the war. And they couldn't even send the US Army in or risk triggering a revolt to be suppressed in blood.
    • Tex and Carson are called in to infiltrate the gang - and find a regiment-sized unit led by none other than Stonewall Jackson (who survived his RL dead). They manage to blow up the armory and steal the regiment's funds, and between that and Jackson being accidentally killed in the explosion the regiment disbands... But between their numbers and Stonewall Jackson there's no doubt that if they had enough time they would have indeed restarted the Civil War.