In Through Red Windows, old-money architecture becomes cosmic horror
Horror comic fans will get a windfall this October with Through Red Windows, a new series from the combined and formidable talents of writer Ram V (The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, Detective Comics) and artist Joëlle Jones (Wonder Girl, Lady Killer), published by Dstlry.
“Through Red Windows has been an exercise in [sowing] discomfort,” Jones told Polygon via email.
The series follows up-and-coming financier Athul Laal, who accepts an invitation to live in his plutocratic mentor’s 73-story Manhattan residence and office building. Then, as Jones put it, “chaos and viscera” ensue.
Ram V said the series grew from his love of Edgar Allan Poe, and from making a lot of friends in the architecture department during college, which instilled in him a fascination for altered reality within highly designed spaces.
“Psycho-geography has also been an ongoing obsession of my work,” Ram told Polygon via email. “The high-rise element of this story comes from there. I’d also been interested in telling a story that looked at wealth, old wealth as a sort of Eldritch Entity with eternal self-perpetuation as a motive. And I’d wanted to tell a story of the dehumanizing nature of modern day ambition, especially as I see it in the nouveau riche, Indian entrepreneur.”
“The business aesthetic is inherently harsh and desaturated; greys, whites, blacks, and navy blues set around right angles,” Jones said of her work on the series. “It’s incredibly austere. Having that contrast against the eldritch and supernatural has been a fantastic challenge and a lot of fun—it’s injecting chaos and viscera into a design that relies on uniformity and perfection. Hopefully you’ll never read another comic like it.”
Jones shared two pages of strikingly colored interior art from the upcoming first issue. [Ed. note: The pages contain a depiction of suicide.]
Through Red Windows will be told in longer than usual 48-page installments, starting with Through Red Windows #1 this October, available for preorder or
Read more on polygon.com
