"In Your Skin" #1 Advanced Review

Credits

• Written and lettered by Aditya Bidikar
• Illustrated by Som
• Colored by Francesco Segala with Gloria Martinelli
• Designed by Dylan Todd and Courtney Menard
• Edited by Eric Harburn for Tiny Onion and Image.

Imagine. Imagine meeting your favorite celebrity in person. Imagine talking to them, shaking their hand, connecting with them. Imagine what you would say, what you would do. What you would feel.

Imagine. Imagine developing a relationship, a romance, a friendship, a partnership. Imagine how it would go, wondrous and effortless. Pieces of lives clicking together, the final bits of a long lost puzzle reunited at last.

Imagine. It’s not hard. In fact, it’s easy. So easy.

Too easy.

This is where we find Priyanka, our protagonist, in the opening pages of the first issue of “In Your Skin,” a new four-issue mini series from writer and letterer Aditya Bidikar, artist Som, and colorists Francesco Segala with Gloria Martinelli. Priyanka is obsessed with Bollywood star Ayesha Sen. She dreams about her, dreams about being with her, dreams about being her.

She dances to do so, emulating, inhabiting, embodying Ayesha’s performances, grabbing Ayesha from the ether in a duet that warps and distorts their bodies into one, drifting across the pages before crashing back to earth, her feet bloody, her ego all her own again. On top of this dance, TV screens inform us of the public’s perception of Ayesha (plus the public version of Priyanka the Fan) as captions - white text on a black box with foreboding red borders - punctuate the pages with mood-setting narration; short, poetic, and measured statements of interiority that reframes the art. In the second person, of course.

It is a strong opening…on a second or third read. On a first read, I struggled to hold onto “In Your Skin.” These first few scenes are intentionally disorienting and paired down to their barest essentials. We are given precious little in the way of concrete details about Priyanka. Who she is, what she does, what’s her relationship with Nachiket. Whys swirl around her and while I was compelled by the slow, generated drumbeat of voyeuristic curiosity to keep the pages turning - I stare at the comic and the comic stares back - I also felt I needed something, anything more to ground myself.

Som’s art, too, has some hiccups. Reminiscent of early Christian Ward, though colored by Segala & Martinelli with an eye for the dusty street rather than the psychedelic stars, it is not infrequent that characters will shift and melt and mold as if made of clay (or played by Clayface.) There’s this one panel of Priyanka in the coffee shop that stood out. She’s gritting her teeth, talking acerbically with her mom, who isn’t listening anyway. Her jaw distends, like it’s popped out of its socket, or her tongue is trying to escape through her cheek.

Moreover, there are a number of wide shots that feel perfunctory, as if the comic wanted to be up-close with the characters but knew we needed an establishing shot. The opening panel in the coffee shop is the most egregious. By all accounts, it should work, and it does to an extent, but I found myself distracted by how far away we are from these small, grey silhouettes in the window of the diner.

The third panel on the page has a similar disconnect where the coloring around Priyanka’s mom makes her look like she was cut out and pasted into a scene of writer Ram V having coffee with a friend rather than organically there. These moments stand out in part because other scenes are so well paneled: see the entire Target scene, and the pigeons (the pigeons! John Woo would be proud.)

Upon reflection, placing the poster for Target as the first page may have been what dislodged me from the early parts of the story. A bit of in-world ephemera, it set an expectation - that we’d see some of the film as the lead in - before delivering something else. It is possible Priyanka’s dancing is meant to be that transition, a red herring of a scene from the film that reveals itself to be fantasy. Alas, it didn't work. Blame my lack of Bollywood familiarity.

And it’s not as if the poster’s design - with Ayesha buried in the bottom left third behind her two male co-stars; an afterthought; background - isn’t meaningful. It is. Yet I remained distracted by this choice, unable to find the comic’s rhythm because of it.

Perhaps this was all a matter of learning as one goes, of getting through the necessary set-up to get to the meat of the story because here, late in the comic, is where the issue fully clicked.

As this is a very advanced review, I won’t go into any details - preserve the mystery and all that. Suffice it to say, the scene that got me was at the halfway point. It isn’t the most upsetting in the book - that honor goes to the final page - though it was, for me at least, a close second.

It is a vaguely tender, deeply sad, uncomfortable scene, fulfilling the comic’s remit of body horror in a very different, far more everyday way. A three-page sequence, visually reminiscent of the opening splash-page (after the poster,) bathed in red, the toned shading giving way to rough pencils. A far cry from the pages that precede and succeed it - full of grounded, somewhat bright color and full backgrounds. 

If the opening is unsettlingly false - the fantasy Priyanka wills in her head as she dances - then this scene is unsettlingly true. It is her reality laid bare, conflicted and tense. A tension of her own making as she tries to make everything, everything, fit the the story she is telling herself: that she is the one she idolizes - in mind, in spirit.

In body.

It truly is a turning point. For me, for the narrative, for the character, for the book. It clarified all the whys of Priyanka without revealing a single detail. All my doubts melted away. Early scenes, like Nachiket cleaning Priyanka's feet, take on new dimensions. The comic only gets better, and more disturbing, from there. It also has my favorite bit of lettering, the BAM BAM BAMs on page 25. Gorgeously vibrant yellow slamming into the inky blackness. Interestingly, the only page with SFX too.

Misery for the internet age is too pat a descriptor for “In Your Skin,” even as it’s the touchstone that I keep returning to. “In Your Skin” isn’t really about the internet’s relationship to obsessive fan culture. That’s just one tool in its arsenal. However, it feels right.

The depth to which Priyanka can delve, the sheer volume of information and access to up-to-the-minute info could never have been possible before. It is intrinsic to her experience. Yet what we see of her obsession is relegated to the personal and the offline. Perhaps Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is more apt, with its dreamlike qualities and focus on the obsessive as much as the obsessed over; Me-Mania even looks kinda like...well, you'll see.

Whatever comparison you want to draw, “In Your Skin” #1 is a provocative and gooshy start to a dark and yearning exploration of loneliness, possession, desire, and the particular parasociality that celebrity and fan takes on in this day and age. Where it goes from here is anyone's guess, and boy oh boy is that exciting.

Final order cutoff for "In Your Skin" is March 30th and the book is on sale April 22nd. Find your local comic book shop here.