THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2024! “For better or worse, the bodies we inhabit are our homes. But despite the old adage, home isn’t always the safest place to be…”. So reads the eerie blurb of Ashley Robin Franklin’s The Skin You’re In, published by Silver Sprocket. This colossal compendium is a definitive collection of all of Franklin’s horror comics to date, including One Million Tiny Fires and Fruiting Bodies, as well as five never-before-seen comics that will leave your teeth chattering.
Published in a deluxe fabric-bound hardcover with glossy foil accents, the cover of The Skin You’re In is visually stunning. Using folkloric elements, as well as more classic bodily horror, the cover is a mirage of unsettling visions, from flying eyeballs to rotting ribcages. The horror continues within, as Franklin navigates the reader through a labyrinth of eight disturbing horror comics that will get under your skin. Franklin focuses on the darkest parts of the natural world around us, with her introduction illustrated in comic form reminding readers that “not all beautiful things are gentle, nor all small things harmless”, as a beautiful butterfly trails thorny vines behind it, hidden beneath its beautiful wings.
Drawn in charcoal illustrations befitting the macabre tone, Franklin weaves her web of queer-focused, unnerving vignettes, all with an emphasis on the ominous side of the natural world. In One Million Tiny Fires, a relationship is never the same again after deadly, otherworldly forces intervene in the natural order of things. In Remnants, a man is haunted by a past relationship, in which he abused his partner; but Mother Nature isn’t about to let it lie. In Fruiting Bodies, a family trip takes a dark turn when they become lost in a winding forest, and a mysterious woman joins them, with sinister intentions. In Franklin’s oldest comic, No Bones Nancy, a disturbing folk tale told around the camp fire has very real and sinister ramifications. The slithering, creeping tentacles of plant roots and vines on the periphery of many of the panels consistently give a sense of unease and unsafeness, even when the characters feel perfectly safe in their surroundings.
Thematically, all the stories are interlinked, with their focus on the uncanniness of nature as well as queer relationships, and it definitely felt like they could all be taking place in the same world. Franklin’s use of lighter tones at the center of the pages, often illuminated by a fire, and blackness emerging from the periphery forces readers’ eyes to the action, rather than the menacing lurking forces of nature. Much like her protagonists, everything in us says to ignore the encroaching horror and look the other way. Stylistically, the comics either havd very subtle or very obvious differences. Franklin’s style has become more refined and smoother since her first comic, reanimation horror No Bones Nancy, originally drawn for an Inktober challenge. Whilst Remnants and Fruiting Bodies are drawn in what has become their staple black and white curvy cartoons, #PlantMom was more experimental, and is told entirely through colourful stylised Instagram posts, YouTube videos and Facebook posts.
Franklin joins a host of other comic writers who choose to focus on and play with the subtle horrors of nature. Iqbal Ali and Priscilla Grippa’s Plant Life and Yasmeen Abedifard’s When to Pick a Pomegranate are just a few of the contemporary graphic novels that have experimented with the duality of nature, and how it can cause pain as well as pleasure. The title of one of the longer comics, Fruiting Bodies, alludes to the terrifying anatomy of mushroom, a fungus which appears beautiful on the outside. Much like an iceberg, the mushroom itself is merely a small part of the whole fungus, which is, terrifyingly, the world’s largest living organism, spanning over three miles underground: “It’s one giant living thing. All connected”.
With botanical horror on the rise, Franklin’s detailed, gory compendium is well worth picking up at this year’s Thought Bubble convention.
Ashley Robin Franklin (W/A) • Silver Sprocket, £39.99
Review by Lydia Turner
Silver Sprocket will be at Table C8-9 in the DSTLRY Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2024 runs from November 11th-17th with the convention weekend taking place on the 16th-17th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2024 coverage so far in one place here.
Art by Rocío Arreola Mendoza
