Webcomic Wednesday: “Out of Skin” by Emily Carroll

By this point, harrowing new horror comics by Emily Carroll are a hallowed Halloween tradition. “Out of Skin,” her latest, is also her scariest, which is saying a great deal. Much of what you need to know about it you can gleam from the initial image, which you’ll find above: a sylvan setting, a sophisticated approach to color and lighting, cascading lettering that implies a certain graceful flow, and a pile of dead bodies that stops it like an axe to the skull. Reading “Out of Skin” is a matter of enduring several shocks of that sort – not jumpscares, but worse. They’re images that subvert and corrupt the material into which they’re inserted: Eyeballs rendered as circled asterisks, alien and uncommunicative; a friendly man and comfy forest converted to a butcher and his slaughterhouse by a red shift in the color palette; a cozy cabin transformed into a Boschian temple of flesh; a human face rendered as porous and violable as a blanket slung loosely over a bloodied bed. Scrolling through this comic is a dreadful experience, in the best sense of the word. “Out of Skin” will get under yours.