The Skin You’re In
Cartoonist: Ashley Robin Franklin
Publisher: Silver Sprocket
Publication Date: November 2024
Ashley Robin Franklin’s The Skin You’re In is a rich and earthy collection of seven botanical horror stories. In the subversive tradition of queer horror, botanical horror digs beneath the superficial topsoil of normative understandings of humanity to expose the creatures crawling through our roots. Whether set in the deep forest or the open desert, Franklin’s comics are permeated with a sense of inhuman wildness. The characters in this collection venture into the wilderness with good intentions, but they all discover that nature isn’t always nurturing.
One of my favorite stories in The Skin You’re In is “#plantmom,” which is narrated as a series of social media screenshots. Tabitha, a young and attractive Instagram influencer, posts photos of herself and her plants to her account @tabithagrows. One of her posts receives a comment with an offer of a “rare specimen” from an account called, simply, “seed.” Seed has no followers, and an air of strangeness hovers over their photogrid. Nevertheless, Tabitha’s interest in botany is genuine, and she’s nothing if not enthusiastic about engagement with her followers.
Tabitha accepts the mysterious seedling and begins to obsess over its growth. As the plant flourishes, Tabitha becomes eerily gaunt. People in Tabitha’s neighborhood start to share photos of her house, which appears overgrown and abandoned. Fleshy vegetal growth eventually breaks through the windows and roof, and a video posted on YouTube captures the incredible climax of Tabitha’s transformation.
To me, this is exactly what it feels like to be a creative person posting on social media. Most of us start out simply wanting to share something we love. If we’re lucky, we’re able to find a community. The larger our audience grows, however, the greater the pressure we feel to maintain a positive and unproblematic image. Still, even if an artist’s social media posts look bright and sunny on the surface, the seeds of creativity are often far from wholesome.
#plantmom isn’t a morality tale; it’s something far weirder and unexplainable, and its ending invites speculation. The same can be said for each of the stories The Skin You’re In, a collection that resists facile interpretations while delighting in the macabre.
“Night Blooming” offers a similarly ambiguous character arc. After the death of his partner, Hector leaves his apartment in Austin and settles into an old farmhouse at the edge of the South Texas desert scrubland. As soon as the movers leave, Hector’s new neighbor Ruth comes over to welcome him. Ruth lost her son decades ago, but she’s still intimate with her grief. She’s friendly and supportive, and she seems to be just the friend Hector needs. Still, Hector is disturbed by the long walks Ruth takes at night to an overgrown tangle of briars, and his suspicions prove true. It turns out that Ruth’s grief is still fresh because she’s feeding it. Literally.
What I appreciate about Franklin’s comics is how that their characters are problematic in small and relatable ways. They behave badly and make mistakes. They also struggle to communicate, a challenge that becomes even more difficult when they’re unsure of what they’ve seen or experienced. Many of Franklin’s characters are queer, trans, and nonbinary, but that doesn’t really matter. Plants don’t care about human identities, nor do they distinguish between human concepts of good and evil. The earth swallows everyone equally.
The collection’s thematic progression from story to story gradually prepares the reader for the final piece, “Contest Winner,” which concludes with a shocking twist. This revelation would be horrific in any other context, but it feels remarkably life-affirming at the end of The Skin You’re In. Perhaps this final encounter with inhuman queerness might even feel like coming home.
Whether the setting is the shadows of the forest or the pale moonlight of the desert, Franklin’s dynamic comic art is just as adept at conveying human emotion as it is at creating a tangible sense of place. Characters often shrink from the spotlight and hide at the edges of panels before claiming their emotions and dramatically expressing themselves. Trees loom in the background, and all manner of undergrowth twines around the borders of the panels. Perfectly normal and comfortable interiors evolve alongside the characters into an ever-increasing uncanniness.
Each of the seven stories in The Skin You’re In is eerily beautiful and unnerving. Even as Franklin’s queer and female characters exist in a world that doesn’t perceive their humanity as normative, these stories provide a visceral reminder that there’s nothing “normal” about being a human on a planet that hosts a vast array of organisms.
“I’ve been fantasizing about this book existing for years now, a creepy cursed object filled to the brim with horrors of my very own,” Franklin writes in the Afterword. And indeed, with its handsome pitch-black cover and blood-red foil embossing, Silver Sprocket’s hardcover edition of The Skin You’re In is a weighty tome that adds a glamorous touch of forbidden knowledge to any bookshelf.
The Skin You’re In is available now via Silver Sprocket
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