Comics by Sean T. Collins

The name…is Sean T. Collins. I’m a writer and critic who’s appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vulture, Decider, Grantland, the AV Club, and more. I’m also the co-founder (with Stefan Sasse) of The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, a podcast about Game of Thrones & A Song of Ice and Fire, and the co-editor (with Julia Gfrörer) of Mirror Mirror II, an anthology of horror/erotic/gothic comics and art published by 2dcloud. I’m The Original Bad Boy of TV Criticism. I gave this nickname to myself as a joke but it stuck so it counts.

Also, I love Road House, the 1989 Patrick Swayze action movie. Road House is the story of Dalton, a famous bouncer whose quest to free a small town from the iron fist of the guy who is on the verge of opening the area’s first JC Penney will lead directly to the deaths of over half a dozen men. I love Road House so much in fact that in late 2018 I decided I would write an essay about Road House every single day for an entire year, that year being 2019—on top of the TV recaps, album reviews, film and television recommendations, and broader essays and deep dives I write for a living.

In the words of Road House, I’d like to make a better life for myself.

By subscribing to my new Patreon you’ll make Pain Don’t Hurt a paying concern. If you’re a fan of my Road House stuff this sells itself. But the beauty of getting paid to write about any one thing is that it makes it possible to write even more about other things. If you’ve ever enjoyed anything I’ve written, subscribing here is the best way to see more of it—both through tiered rewards that give you access to bonus stuff and simply by helping my family and I stay afloat so I can do more of the writing I love. (I love to write even more than I love Road House, though it’s obviously close.)

Here’s the Patreon. Yes, it’s technically for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, and yes, I split it half and half with my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse. But a) Stefan’s cool and deserves the scratch too, and b) you needn’t be interested in BLAH or the perks associated with becoming a patron to donate this way. Every bit helps.

And here’s the PayPal. This goes directly to me and you can make it a monthly subscription-type thing if you feel like it. Again, every bit helps. 

I have big plans for this year and money is a constant worry, and I’m uncertain as to how my absence from Twitter will affect me professionally. Your financial support at any level means the world to me.

“In a year that many have found bleak and depressing, Mirror Mirror II managed to channel this energy into one of the most riveting visual experiences of the year….the best horror comics anthology available.” —Phillippe Leblanc

“This book should win all the design awards for 2017. It’s as magnificent as the contents are (purposely) horrific.” —Heidi MacDonald

Here’s the Patreon. Yes, it’s technically for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast, and yes, I split it half and half with my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse. But a) Stefan’s cool and deserves the scratch too, and b) you needn’t be interested in BLAH or the perks associated with becoming a patron to donate this way. Every bit helps.

And here’s the PayPal. This goes directly to me and you can make it a monthly subscription-type thing if you feel like it. Again, every bit helps. 

I have big plans for this year and money is a constant worry, and I’m uncertain as to how my absence from Twitter will affect me professionally. Your financial support at any level means the world to me.

MIRROR MIRROR II edited by Sean T. Collins & Julia Gfrörer

Darkness is as intimate as a caress and as distant as history in this chilling anthology of horror comics….This collection doesn’t just feel haunting; it feels corrosive.

T-shirt designs by Julia Gfrörer ( @doopliss )

MIRROR MIRROR II @ DESERT ISLAND BROOKLYN signing and book release party

Thursday, September 28th 7-9pm Desert Island 540 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn, NY

featuring Lala Albert Sean T. Collins Al Columbia Gretchen Alice Felker-Martin Julia Gfrörer Aidan Koch Laura Lannes

Our anthology Mirror Mirror II, edited by Julia Gfrörer and myself, is now officially for sale from our publisher, 2dcloud. Click here to order, and see an extensive preview. 

Contributors include Lala Albert, Clive Barker, Heather Benjamin, Sean Christensen, Nicole Claveloux, Sean T. Collins, Al Columbia, Dame Darcy, Gretchen Alice Felker-Martin, Noel Freibert, Renee French, Meaghan Garvey, Julia Gfrörer, Simon Hanselmann, Aidan Koch, Laura Lannes, Céline Loup, Uno Moralez, Mou, Jonny Negron, Claude Paradin, Chloe Piene, Josh Simmons, Carol Swain, and Trungles. 

Our contributors come from Australia, Brazil, England, France, Mexico, Russia, Wales, and the United States. The youngest is 24. The oldest is 77. The majority are women. They are trans and cis, straight and queer. They make comics, zines, fine art, music, film, literature, and journalism. For our book they made work basted around horror, pornography, the gothic, and the abject. They made dark, vulnerable work that reflects the dark, vulnerable world, in hopes that confronting it moves us toward empathy.

Here’s what people are saying about it:

“Mirror Mirror II is troubling and challenging, but it is also rewarding and stunning—a thrilling experience that readers won’t soon forget.” —Shea Hennum, The A.V. Club, “The A.V. Club’s Favorite Comics of 2017 So Far”

“It awakens the long-underused [horror] genre and pushes your fear buttons in ways you could never have anticipated. It’s hard to pick the most memorably mind-devouring portion.” —Abraham Riesman, Vulture, “8 Comics You Need to Read This June”

“Reading this is like dreaming — though whether you’re immersed in a nightmare or a wet dream is unclear….This book is like a porn stash you’d find in the cupboard of a medieval demon.” —Dan Schindel, Hyperallergic

“Mirror Mirror II is at once a frivolous memento mori and an outright challenge to your own personal space.” —Austin Lanari, Comics Bulletin

“This is a book that provokes, that pushes and pulls, that strips down to the bone and re-clothes in different flesh any notions you might have about horror, pornography, and abjection. It’s wonderful….I haven’t had a book challenge me this much in a long time.” —Sarah Miller, Sequentialist

“A thought-provoking, richly entertaining collection from some of the most exciting comic artists working today. A must read for fans of the horrific and perverse.” —Bryan Cogman, Game of Thrones

“An impressive collection of beautiful depictions of grotesque things and grotesque depictions of beautiful things.” —Alan Resnick, Unedited Footage of a Bear / This House Has People in It

“Editors Sean T. Collins and Julia Gfrörer have assembled an exquisitely creepy and seductive new collection of comics with Mirror Mirror II. From Uno Moralez’s pixelated noirs to Dame Darcy’s ornate Gothic ghost stories, the wide range of horror here is fantastic, as characters creep and fuck in the shadows of unimaginable darkness throughout. It’s certainly the perfect, freaky anthology for you, your lover, and all the demons in your mind.” —Hazel Cills, MTV News / Jezebel

“Mirror Mirror II invites the most innovative creators working in the form today and proves just how expansive the pornographic and gothic can be, encapsulating the pop cultural, fantastical, and realistic in one fell swoop.” —Rachel Davis, Rookie / The Comics Journal

I am so proud of this book and hope you enjoy it. 

When I was younger, I practiced vipassana meditation.  Unlike my current zen habit of ‘just-sitting’, vipassana asked me to contemplate the true nature of reality by focusing on certain images that would help bring me closer to truth. One of the pertinent images that drove the Buddha towards the path of enlightenment was that of a corpse. But when you haven’t really seen a corpse that wasn’t pumped full of embalming fluid and dressed up for you, there is some serious detachment from what it really means to see inside of Death. Still, I think those hours spent drumming up morbid-but-hollow imagery were the closest I had ever gotten to actually thinking about The Abject.  And I would argue it is only about as close as a S.I. swimsuit cover could take you to thinking about the truly erotic.

Bubblegum enlightenment.

In her foreword to Mirror Mirror II, Felker-Martin asks readers like me to consider horror on a continuum with the erotic; this realm—the realm of The Abject—weaves through our humanity; from our sexuality, to the desires we bury, and back through to the very fragility of our flesh and what that means for us as everyday creatures.  More than bubblegum enlightenment, this sets up a spectrum of artwork that acts as what anthology editor and contributor Julia Gfrörer calls on a recent Process Party podcast, a “sublime ritual of degradation.”

And while my girlfriend probably isn’t thrilled about the idea of watching Hellraiser, Mirror Mirror II brought at least one more person to the altar of fiction which rends flesh. Prior to this anthology, my interest in horror media generally was almost exactly ZERO.  Felker-Martin’s prognosis for the reader gave me pause: “What you’re about to read will hurt you.” Why in the fuck would I want that?

[…]

In writing this review, I first attempted to sum things up as best I could about the kind of work Mirror Mirror II is; but so many of the individual works themselves reached out and grabbed me in particular ways that I felt compelled to say something about each one.And this just kept happening.  

There’s still more work to talk about, from Carol Swain (shit, one of my favorite comics in the book was hers!), Al Columbia(!), Noel Freibert, Dame Darcy(!!), Mou, Uno Moralez, a murderer’s row of Clive Barker illustrations(!!!!!), a piece authored by co-editor Collins, and more.  But any omissions certainly won’t haunt me as much as the work itself.

While words like “degradation” and “abject” don’t follow a straight line to “empathy” either in a thesaurus or in the minds of many people, there is obviously a broadening of perspective that comes when you are rendered vulnerable.  And you cannot will yourself into vulnerability.  Alone, you can only conjure decay once you are already no longer living and breathing.  While you can still feel and fuck and fear, you must be led by a dark muse to a fetid clearing where a more communal sense of perversion and violation crawls between your toes.  You must peer at what lies just beyond.

You must hurt.

Mirror Mirror II by various (2dcloud)

There was a time when you could rely on comic books for bone-deep terror — the early-1950s was the heyday of horror tales produced by publishers like EC Comics. Alas, that heyday was cut short by a moral panic and a subsequent regime of censorship, and horror comics never quite recovered as a phenomenon. Thank goodness, then, for Mirror Mirror II, a new collection of short horror pieces edited by Sean T. Collins (who is a contributor to Vulture) and Julia Gfrörer. It awakens the long-underused genre and pushes your fear buttons in ways you could never have anticipated. It’s hard to pick the most memorably mind-devouring portion: Is it cartoonist Mou’s tale of a guy who one day finds himself painfully ejaculating letters that spell out a set of cryptic sentences? Or filmmaker Clive Barker’s painted vignettes of savaged and distorted human figures? Or Al Columbia’s unnerving single-panel depictions of old-timey cartoon characters engaging in unspeakable acts? Open wide and decide for yourself.

Mirror Mirror II

Julia Gfrörer, my partner and co-editor on the MIRROR MIRROR II anthology coming soon from 2dcloud, are the guests on this week’s episode of the Process Party podcast! Cartoonists and co-hosts Mike Dawson and Zack Soto go deep with us on the making of the book and our own contributions to it. At one point it gets really real out of nowhere! Please listen!

Spring Collection

books

— Yours by Sarah Ferrick — Sound of Snow Falling by Maggie Umber — Mirror Mirror II edited by Sean T. Collins & Julia Gfrörer featuring work by Lala Albert  Clive Barker  Heather Benjamin  Apolo Cacho  Sean Christensen  Nicole Claveloux  Sean T. Collins  Al Columbia  Dame Darcy  Noel Freibert  Renee French  Meaghan Garvey  Julia Gfrörer  Simon Hanselmann  Claude Paradin  Aidan Koch  Laura Lannes  Céline Loup  Uno Moralez  Mou  Jonny Negron  Chloe Piene  Josh Simmons  Carol Swain Trungles

zines