TINY GEMS

Senses Working Overtime posts Halloween-themed content for the month of October, which led me to a 1972 issue of Dracula, a Spanish fantasy and horror comic book. The stories in “Fear, Sweet, Fear” by Enric Sió (particularly “Krazy”) are amazing – they tell simple, bizarre stories of everyday life transformed into something alien and terrifying – the trademark tone of the best horror. The use of vibrant, cheerful colors only drives home the strangeness of it all.

Next Tuesday, the Kelly Writers House is hosting a comic book event, featuring comics expert Douglas Wolk and Hans Rickheit, creator of Chrome Fetus Comics. Chrome Fetus is somewhere between Edgar Allan Poe, David Cronenberg and David Lynch; like Sió, Rickheit takes a similarly detached tone, using his illustrations to emphasize bodily transformations and the intersection of technology and the body. Wolk is present to talk about comics in general, and the need to approach them as a serious and distinct art form (as he discusses in his book, Reading Comics); while this recent reception of comics into “high culture” is great for currently working (and living) artists like Rickheit, I’m not sure if anyone has ever looked back to 1970s Spanish horror comics to seriously think about Sió’s work as art. Did he even think of himself as an artist?