There’s Trungles’ ‘Shifts’, a dark vignette of a captive princess drawn with a Disney-like ornateness that teases and cuts abruptly like foreplay, and Uno Moralez’s ‘Vitalya (I’m Fucking Tired of You)’, a pixelated dark-alley-in-a-video-game comic from an anonymous 44-year-old artist from Moscow, with whom Collins held a rare interview.Īt a time when real, human-rights-violating terrors abound, and the collective stomach is weak, eroticizing fear can be construed as escapist or sensationalist. It features many exciting players in contemporary comics – Aidan Koch’s charcoal-smudged, impressionistic dream-panels, Lala Albert’s scratchy images with a psilocybin sense of wetness, Clive Barker’s broad-stroked, Egon-Schiele-esque, contorted corpses. But the brilliance of Mirror Mirror II is its push beyond what Gfrörer calls ‘crisis images’ (“the cum shot, the death scene, whatever”) into the outstretched tension surrounding the terror, which descend on the stories like fog.īounded in an elegant black matte cover, the anthology is covered in more black ink than white space. Blood, boobs, violence – in today’s near-saturated visual landscape, few things leave an impression on the mind before landing in the wasteyard of gratuity. What’s challenging about working with these themes is surpassing the pitfalls of triteness.

The coupling is Hollywood, like ghostly Marilyn Manson clad in black with Rose McGowan in a scarlet gown that plunges at the bustline. Twin pillars of American culture, sex and death are both verboten and banal. Courtesy the artist + 2dcloud, Minnesota. Aidan Koch in Mirror Mirror II (2017) Illustration. Ecstasy, a coveted state, comes from the Ancient Greek ekstasis, to “stand outside oneself.” The closest thing to rapturous, death-like bliss, so the French insist, are orgasms. In the foreword of Mirror Mirror II, the freshly-arrived erotic horror comic anthology edited by Julia Gfrörer and Sean T Collins and released in July by Minnesota-based publisher 2dcloud, Gretchen Alice Felker-Martin writes, “great horror is the pursuit of meaning through defilement, a conscious and inquisitive violation of the mind, the body, the beloved, the home.” In a safe, trusting environment, losing control can feel exhilarating, like bungeeing out of the body before snapping back in. Among what both arousal and fear share is how the sensations strip you bare.

Impressions by Aidan Koch