"Necrophobia" by Rand Michie

Hello to all you wonderful readers of Art Ducko!

My name is Rand Michie, and I’m here today to talk about a comic I’m currently writing, called Necrophobia. This is a psychological survival-horror graphic novel, set within what remains of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. You follow a young heroin addict (named Tristan) as he navigates the hellish remnants of a once-familiar world. The comic itself is about fears, how we project them into our lives and onto our environment. This ranges from fear of the unknown and unseen, or rather of the intimately known, but above all, the fear of death. Necrophobia deals with some pretty heavy subject matter, and can be quite graphic. As such, let me preface this by saying that this is a comic intended for mature readers.

We’re currently about to finish the third issue, and we’re compiling it all within Volume 1, set to be about 100 pages of grimy, nasty, wonderful art. More specifically on the nature of the art itself: Mackenzie Lageson is the illustrator, and his style is a wonderful marriage of detail-heavy woodcuts and the horrific anatomical detail you might see in Junji Ito’s work, all placed through a heavy fog of surrealism that permeates the story.

Again, this comic is about fears, and how they might warp the world should they all become free, simultaneously. This is exactly what has happened in Necrophobia: the vast collective gestalt of human fear, a sort of superconsciousness, was released due to a mysterious cataclysm. This killed most people outright, and left the world behind a twisted, hellish reflection. The world we know is gone in Necrophobia; what Tristan and the other survivors are faced with is what that primal part of the brain might see, where every single thing is a potential danger, and the vestigial, half-formed desires and fears that we don’t even consciously process on a daily basis are now coming to life. It is a world where your nightmares are clad in bone and blood, and seep up through the floors at night, or unfold on long rickety legs from beneath the bed. It is, in short, a world where fear is made flesh, and only the strongest, or the most desperate, can survive.

So, if you dare, follow Tristan as he moves through this terrifying and fascinating landscape. You’ll encounter all sorts of nasty things, but so too will you engage with human fear and emotion in a bare and raw fashion, as the scattered survivors of this disaster struggle to make sense of what killed the world.

Thank you for your time. If you’re interested, you can read Necrophobia online here, and you can find out more about it and all of our other projects here. If you have any questions, feel free to email us there.

We’re running a kickstarter for Necrophobia (83% funded!) that ends on February 16th. We’d love it if you checked it out, so click here!