Fans who know Ed Piskor for his Hip Hop Family Tree series or X-Men Grand Design are in for a gruesome change of pace in Red Room #1. His nostalgic takes on music legends and comic heroes are nowhere to be found in this horrific exploration of the darkest corners of the internet. The publication of Red Room marks the beginning of a new series of interconnected but stand-alone horror comics published by Fantagraphics. The gigantic 64- page issue is a gory, blood-spattered tour de force.
Red Room #1 begins with Davis Fairfield, a clerk at the courthouse, whose wife and daughter are killed in a car accident. Davis and his surviving daughter, Brianna, struggle to process this sudden tragedy as bills pile up and Brianna prepares to leave home for college. Davis’s grief dredges up old hobbies from his past and soon he finds himself watching illegal “red room” videos on the dark web again. These videos, produced by the clandestine Mistress Pentagram and a cast of ghoulish performers, depict real-life scenes of torture and murder. Mistress Pentagram and her employees produce these illegal videos from a secret location and stream them live on the dark webs for fans who pay obscene amounts of money to watch the proceedings.
Piskor peels the curtain of secrecy away from the dark web to reveal a business more heinous than anyone could imagine. He is building a world populated by murderers and monsters. But, as over-the-top and vile as it is, it also functions as an exploration of internet culture as a whole. Issues of online privacy and the potentially disastrous real-life ramifications of online behavior are front and center in Red Room. Piskor has said that his experiences running his youtube channel Cartoonist Kayfabe informed his writing and world-building, which explains the lived-in nature of the Red Room universe. The comment sections feature archetypes that can be found in any online fan community and even screen names that would feel at home on Twitter or Reddit. These small details bring a degree of believability to the outrageous scenes of violence, making them all the more unsettling.
Though, the word “unsettling” doesn’t go far enough. Piskor’s gore is hideous and obsessive and impossible to look away from. At one point, Mistress Pentagram is critiquing a performer named Paleface’s live stream- she points out that audiences are likely to lose interest in the videos when performers are “too visceral.” Clearly, Piskor disagrees with his character. His drawings are nothing if not visceral. The numerous depictions of mutilated corpses, severed limbs, and broken bones are drawn with a degree of detail and raw energy reminiscent of underground cartoonists like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. Though each torture scene is rendered masterfully, the sheer volume of gore does detract from the horror. After the first grotesquerie, readers know what to expect. So by the third or fourth scene of violence, it comes across as more gratuitous than surprising. Though, that level of excess is a common characteristic of the splatterpunk genre, which Piskor and his maniacal drawings seem hell-bent on revitalizing.
Red Room #1 breathes fresh life into a gory, pulpy genre made popular by creators like Clive Barker and Wes Craven. Piskor has updated the blood and guts brand of horror for the internet age in a truly unflinching 64-page first issue. This comic is not for the faint of heart or the squeamish, but readers looking for cutting-edge ultra-violence will be delighted by the depravity on almost every page.
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