Webcomic Wednesday: The art of Heather Benjamin

Even by the lax standards of a blog given to posting art from the pulp end of the spectrum, finding even remotely SFW Heather Benjamin art is not just a challenge, it’s an adventure. The title of her self-published solo-anthology zine series, Sad Sex, says it all, really. Benjamin uses the dueling visual vocabularies of pin-up art and horror illustration to craft images that are confrontationally graphic in how they address the physically and emotionally unpleasant parts of sex. Benjamin’s women (and they’re almost always women) often scream, shriek, or otherwise contort their faces into rictuses of agony or outrage. They gush blood from every conceivable orifice. They sprout wild, painstakingly delineated medusa-like tendrils of hair from their heads, and grow forests of it so thick on the parts of their bodies society deems they should shave that it could pass for clothing or fur. Chains, vines, lace, and in recent work long stalks that extend the characters’ eyeballs out from their sockets further reinforce the impression that everything Benjamin draws is sprouting – being stretched, pulled, and extruded far beyond rational lengths. But as you can see from the rare piece of commercial illustration that leads this post – the opulent, all but shiny portrait of a smiling woman and a baby jaguar – an ability to draw gorgeously underpins every bit of grotesquerie Benjamin conjures up. The memorably menacing imagery she produces are deliberate choices, a rejoinder to women’s roles in both erotic and horror illustration. Whether Benjamin’s women are smiling with their eyes or oozing blood and tears from them, those eyes are alive – with desire, with pride, with rage, with pain, with a whole variety of emotions, yes, but those emotions are their own. Even at their most abject and abused, their existence is theirs, not anyone else’s. Not even yours.

Benjamin’s most recent collection, Exorcise Book, is available for purchase. Don’t say you weren’t warned.