In Your Skin: Covers, Coverage & India Release

I’ll admit, I was a bit nervous about how people would react to the announcement of In Your Skin. Som’s art is, of course, brilliant, and I think he’s outdoing himself on this one – plus, we’ve got an amazing lineup of cover artists (wait till you see who we’ve got for later issues). But this is a thorny, personal story we’re telling, and while I’ve had a positive response from my beta readers, these are people who already like me. So it’s been great to see the way people have been interested in this story – I can’t wait to have it out in the world.

The book is available to pre-order with your local comic book store, and I highly recommend you do this, since it lets your retailer know how many copies to order (more on that below).

I thought I’d use my website as a hub for everything to do with this book, so I’m reposting the cover with the preview pages, along with details on our variant covers, and further coverage we’ve received since the announcement. Plus, if you live in India and have been wondering how you can get this book, more on that below.

That’s the preview that’s currently out in the world. I’m sure we’ll be doing lettered previews at some point, where you’ll get to read what’s on those pages.

Apart from Som, we’ve got a who’s who of amazing comics artists providing our variants. Our Cover B is by Maria Llovet, one of my favourite artists right now blending horror and erotica.

Cover C (a 1:10 variant) is by Som and my friend, collaborator and award-winning artist Anand RK. Anand was the first person I narrated this story to (I think it was before the pandemic), and I asked if he’d do a cover if/when this book ended up happening. To my delight, he provided this gorgeous fully painted cover.

Cover D (a 1:25 variant) is by the great Tula Lotay. She is one of the finest cover artists in comics, and her cover blends her trademark mix of poise and sensuality with classic Bollywood poster design.

Covers A and B are open order, i.e. a retailer can order as many copies of these as they’d like, while covers C and D are ratio variants, which means a retailer has to order a certain quantity of the regular cover (10 or 25, in this case) to be able to order one copy of the variant.

So basically, you can reach out to your retailer, and order any number of covers A or B. But if you’d like covers C or D, you need to tell them early, because that’ll be based on how many regular covers they end up ordering. Apologies for the repetition, but that’s basically how comics sales work in the direct market – pre-orders trump walk-in orders.

Since we last spoke, the announcement has been covered by Comicon.com. The Comics Beat has the announcement with more quotes from Som and me, while Comic Club Live covered it with a preamble that made me laugh:

Here’s a little story for you. I received an email from Image Comics with the subject line “BOLLYWOOD BODY HORROR MEETS EROTIC FICTION IN UPCOMING IN YOUR SKIN SERIES LAUNCHING THIS APRIL.” And my first thought was “I assume this is from Maria Llovet? And maybe has a cover from Tula Lotay?” Well, reader, I was wrong, it’s actually a four-issue series titled In Your Skin and it comes from Aditya Bidikar and artist Som. But in a twist, it has covers from both Maria Llovet and Tula Lotay, as well as Anand RK. So hey, I wasn’t too far off!

Meanwhile, Anand has shared a bunch of close-up details from his cover on Instagram. Som has shared sketches for both the first page of the book as well as his cover for #1. I’ll be posting about these on the blog with some more commentary eventually, but in the meantime – enjoy!

Finally, many folks reached out to ask about the availability of the book in India.

Unfortunately, the single issues – which will be serialised starting April – are unlikely to be available in India, in print, at least. You should be able to buy digital versions of them on Amazon or GlobalComix etc.

However, we will try to make sure that the collected edition will be available in India, and we’d love to do some launch events around it. The precise release date for the collected edition hasn’t been decided yet, but I will of course be talking about it here, and will announce any events that Som and I are likely to be at.