If you’re going to have heroes like the X-Men face their greatest fears, who better to call than the King of Horror himself, Stephen King? While King’s prolific writing career has seen him dip his toes into the world of comics, most of that has been focused on horror and adaptations of his own work. But in a rare contribution to a superhero comic, King subjects a beloved X-Man to a terrifying scenario that reads like a condensed version of his classic novel, Thinner.

Stephen King’s sole work on an X-Men comic appears in the 1985 one-shot Heroes for Hope: Starring the X-Men. This special comic was published to raise money to raise money and awareness about hunger in Africa. Numerous writers and artists contributed short segments to the story, including notable creators like King, George R.R. Martin, Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Harlan Ellison and Frank Miller.

King wrote three pages of the story that were penciled by Bernie Wrightson, inked by Jeff Jones, lettered by Tom Orzechowski and colored by Christie Steele. The segment sees Kitty Pryde enduring a horrifying bout with extreme hunger.

X-Men’s Kitty Pryde Faces the Curse from Thinner

The comic opens with the X-Mansion seemingly transported to the middle of the desert. After this is revealed to be an illusion, the story follows each member of the X-Men as they experience their worst fears. When Kitty Pryde enters the kitchen for a snack, she is confronted by a cloaked figure who identifies himself as Hungry. Hungry places his hands on Kitty and she starts rapidly getting thinner. He offers her a plate of food, only for it to immediately rot once she touches it. The extreme starvation causes her to wither away, and she’s practically a skeleton when Hungry departs, leaving her babbling on the floor in terror.

Reading the story, it’s hard not to be reminded of another King tale of someone wasting away. The novel Thinner follows Billy Halleck, an overweight lawyer who accidentally kills a Romani woman with his car. He is then cursed by the woman’s father with a single word – “Thinner” – and begins to lose weight at an alarming rate, becoming emaciated no matter how much he eats. Obviously, the circumstances in the two stories are very different, as Kitty’s torture turns out to be a vision while Halleck’s is very real. But the haunting pencil work by Swamp Thing co-creator Bernie Wrightson captures the horrific essence of Thinner in just a few pages.

Stephen King’s Scariest Concepts Can Be Used More Than Once

Thinner was published just a year prior to the release of Heroes for Hope. It’s likely that, at the time, few readers considered the similarities between the two works. King wrote Thinner under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. It would turn out to be the last Bachman book that King would publish prior to his identity being publicly revealed in April 1985, just a few months before Heroes for Hope hit stands. But although there are similarities between the two, that’s not to say that King was copying or repeating himself.

Throughout his career, King has often revisited scenarios and characters that he’s found interesting, expanding them or looking at them from different angles. The short story “Night Surf” serves as a sort of prototype for The Stand. In 1996, he wrote two novels, Desperation (published under his own name) and The Regulators (published as a “lost” Bachman book) that serve as mirrors to each other. And his Dark Tower series is filled with characters from previous works. He’s also produced several works based on the idea of evil cars, including the novels Christine and From a Buick 8, the short stories “Trucks” and “Uncle Otto’s Truck,” and his sole directorial effort, the movie Maximum Overdrive.

Some readers who picked up Heroes for Hope likely found the scenario King creates to be even more frightening. That’s because it happens to a fan-favorite hero, rather than to a protagonist like Halleck who, to be honest, deserves his fate. If he were to ever write another X-Men story again, there’s no telling what kind of fresh horrors Stephen King could come up with to plague Marvel’s Merry Mutants.