Only Skin

(Paperback)

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Description

"Sean Ford creates a world that's both eerie and warmly mundane. Not an easy feat." -Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) Only Skin is an exploration of the hallucinatory and grim landscape of rural America seen through the eyes of two orphaned siblings searching for answers in a world filled with terrible questions.

Reviews

"Sean Ford's Only Skin is just the sort of comic book I like reading. Not only a tale of quirky surreal horror, intrigue, adventure and exquisite humor, this book has a great amount of heart." - Farel Dalrymple, author of Omega the Unknown and the Wrenchies

"Sean Ford's Only Skin is a spooky graphic novel about small-town life and death. Ford's deadpan pen-and-ink linework gives the book its sense of quiet menace; reading it, you have no idea what's coming next, but you know it won't be good news for these characters." - Slate

"What's more frightening: the unknown in the woods or the unknown in your neighbors Ford doesn't come down on one side or the other, but beautifully teases out the horror in his premise. The presence of a ghost who resembles the iconic sheet with eyes and a mouth is a particularly interesting choice, seemingly harmless and all the more frightening for it. The ending leaves one unsettled in a way that's rare in any medium and calls to mind Werner Herzog's gift for evoking the uncanny in a truly Freudian sense." - Paste Magazine

"Exposing details of the action or the resolution would be churlish, for many may think them far less interesting than Ford actually makes them and skip this very well-executed graphic novel. Ford draws bigger kids and adults the way Charles Schulz might have, and his backdrops are as spare as the sets of those '50s B-movies. The book's in black-and-white (fortunately), and the big pages of this volume allow many a frame to have cinematic impact." - Booklist

"Blacked-out night walks in town are barely illuminated by streetlamps and sunlit scenes have the spacious panels they call for. When Cassie gets back into the old neighborhood, she finds Chris talking to a cop and cleaning up a ghastly, bloody scene that transpired in the station's lot. By the time she starts asking questions, a number of people have disappeared into the woods. From that point, even in its familiar framing and infrequent spots of dark humor, moments of certainty or comfort are scarce in Only Skin. 'There's a lot of territory out there...' says Chris. Sleepy or not, he means it." - PopMatters

Author Bio

Sean Ford is the creator of Only Skin and Shadow Hills. He graduated from the Center for Cartoon Studies in 2008. Now he lives in Pennsylvania and designs books and walks his dog.