In Your Skin: Kicking into Gear
So, gang! This is the big one – pre-orders for In Your Skin #1 close today, March 30th. If you’d like to get this book, today is the last day to tell your retailer to order it.
Of course, my hope is that it does well enough that it’s available to anyone who walks into a comics store, but those folks have limited shelf space, and it’s useful for every book if the retailer knows how many people want it.
I will admit – I’m a little nervous about this. Basically, today we find how many people in the larger world are going to be interested in buying the book. People who’ve read the book seem to like it, which is what really matters to me. But I would still like to find out that backing my vision has worked out for everyone collaborating with me on this book, starting with Tiny Onion and Som.
Of course, I believe in making work for the long run, so my hope is that however we do on this today, people read and enjoy this book, and tell other people about it. I was asked on a podcast (linked below) what my ambition is with this book, and my answer is that I want people to read this book and come out as different people. That’s my hope when I read a book or watch a movie – that it changes me – and my fervent hope for this book is that it changes you.
I’ve been writing this blogpost for the last 3-4 days, because every time I think I’m done, something else has happened, and I want to add it.
Sometime in the next week or so, I’m planning to set up a dedicated In Your Skin page on the site which collates all the details of the book, covers, as well as reviews/interviews, coverage etc.
First off, In Your Skin #3 has been solicited (i.e. it’s now available for pre-order). I won’t put up the solicit text here because it implicitly spoils issues 1-2 (just a little bit, though we tried to be careful). Instead, here’s our gorgeous covers!
Cover A by Som. What’s with the giant bug? You’ll have to read the book for that!
Cover B by my friend Juni Ba. Juni has … let’s see … heard every version of the story, read a few different outlines, every script, and been an agony aunt for this project. He’s a constant collaborator for me, and he obviously had to be involved with the book. I also adore Juni in horror mode (check out his variant cover for Deniz and Stipan’s Vertigo book Bleeding Hearts), and I absolutely love what he ended up doing here.
You can also see here something amazing our designer Dylan has been doing with the logo (you’ll see it if you look at the logos for issues 1-3 side-by-side).
We were lucky enough to have some of our favourite podcasts interview us about the book.
First, David Harper had me back on Off-Panel (after my first appearance in 2021!) to talk about the evolution of In Your Skin, working with Som and Tiny Onion, and finding work/life balance. (There’s a video version on YouTube if you prefer that.)
Next, Jimmy Gaspero interviewed Som and me for the Cryptid Creator Corner podcast. We had a blast talking about body horror, Bollywood, and old Indian superhero comics, among other things.
Jim Viscardi was nice enough to have me on Let’s Talk Comics – the official Image Comics podcast – to chat about my journey in comics, from loving them as a reader, to lettering for a living, and now writing and launching my first Image comic as a writer. (Again, there’s a video version if you prefer that.)
We’ve also got more reviews coming in, along with pull quotes from comics colleagues.
My colleague on Afterlift, The White Trees and The All-Nighter (he also wrote Batman) Chip Zdarsky wrote about the book in his newsletter:
A wonderful dive into fandom and horror by way of Bollywood, this first issue is both gorgeous and unsettling. Aditya has been known for years as one of the industry’s greatest letterers and now he’s proving he’s also one of its greatest writers.
As expected, I’ve printed this out and pasted it on my studio wall. I also contemplated sending it to that one college professor who said I’d amount to nothing, but I couldn’t find his address.
Iván Brandon, one of my earliest collaborators in comics, was nice enough to write a Substack note about the book:
IN YOUR SKIN was written by my long-time collaborator Aditya Bidikar and drawn by Som, whose work I’m new to. It’s a pretty stunning debut issue, it is warm and soap operatic and dark and gross, it really stretches its legs getting you into its tense Bollywood vibe. It made me miss chai, which is impossible to find here (the real stuff, not the Starbucks stuff) and also made me mad because Aditya told the story in 2nd person which I’ve never been brave enough to do. If you like anxious sexy body horror, go get this book.
He also talks about some of the other comics he’s been reading, including If Destruction Be Our Lot by Matthew Rosenberg and gang.
Nicole Drum at Comicbook.com wrote:
It’s an excellent start to a haunting tale. […] In Your Skin has a great momentum and sets up what feels like it could be one of the most unsettling body horror comics we’ve seen in a while.
Byron O’Neal of Comic Book Yeti did a video review:
There’s almost a carnival energy running through the book: glamour, spectacle, theatricality, the bright lights of fandom pulling you in, while somewhere behind the curtain something grotesque is waiting to be revealed.
The strength of the book is simple: you can’t look away.
Stylish, unsettling, and genuinely fresh.
Dan McMahon at Gatecrashers said:
But Bidikar and Som quickly show how twisted this connection really is. In Your Skin is Aditya Bidikar’s debut series as a writer, which is landed splendidly by a strong narrative that keeps unfolding as you read. This obsession with her favorite actress may be a substitute for her sense of identity. There is one conversation with her mother on the issue that solidified this as a 10/10 debut as a writer.
A powerful showing for both SOM and Aditya Bidikar as future household names for comics.
And about Som’s art:
The art’s flowing style is such a strong introduction to the series. The art style shifts and molds around the story with beautiful intimacy and isolation. The final page is a display of metamorphosis that I am not sure many artists could capture with such weight as Som does.
There are, of course, other things happening at work than In Your Skin.
Last week saw the release of The Department of Truth #36 and w0rldtr33 #20.
Also, “Arrested by Phone”, the comic about India’s digital arrests I worked on with Anand RK, Suparna Sharma and Natalie Obiko Pearson for Bloomberg Technology, won the Kim Wall award at the 87th Annual Overseas Press Club Awards.
I think that’s a fair bit of news to be going with. More soon!
Once again, final order cut-off for In Your Skin #1 is today, so let your local comics retailer know you’d like to get the book.