Bad Blood Is A Blister On Your Soul

by Vince Brusio

If you’ve watched horror movies, you’ve undoubtedly seen The Exorcist. Or Paranormal Activity. Or Poltergeist. Should we continue? The fact is all those movies have one thing in common: possession of the soul. Demons love to tell you what to do, and act nasty. And that pattern of bad blood twisting you into something foul and evil is the secret for success if you pick up Aftershock Comics’ Blood Blister #1 (NOV161074) from Phil Hester and Tony Harris. Read our PREVIEWSworld Exclusive interview with Phil Hester who tells us the battle of the body can take us to places quite dark and foreboding.

Blood Blister #1 (NOV161074) is in comic shops February 1.

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Vince Brusio: Tell us about the premise for this story. We fade in from black, and what do we see play out? It sounds like the backdrop for Blood Blister #1 (NOV161074) is a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.

Phil Hester: Not exactly. It takes place in modern America, which I guess you could mistake for Sodom & Gomorrah. In some sense it's about the moral compromises we make every day to get ahead, and how, in a just universe, we would suffer for those trespasses, in this case, quite horribly.

At its core, Blood Blister is a story of demonic possession, but not the possession of an unfortunate innocent, but of someone who decidedly earned that fate. The evil consuming Brandon Hull's soul and body started with him, gestated in him, and now rules him. He gave birth to his own demonic alter ego. In some ways he is more fortunate than others, because he can see the evil that he does. What he actually does about it is the crux of the story.

Vince Brusio: Describe for us the main character, Brandon Hull. He appears to be rotten to the core. Which means he's a politician, right? Or is he worse? Is he (gasp) a lawyer?

Phil Hester: He is! Actually more of a fixer, like Michael Clayton or Ray Donovan. Technically he is a lawyer, but he does all kinds of shady things for his clients, specifically, he tries to get corporate polluters off the hook for their environmental crimes. Outwardly he appears perfect. Handsome, fit, rich, but inside he's rotten. When that corruption begins to take root on his once-perfect flesh, he fears for his sanity before realizing the evil haunting him is both real and supernatural. How can he save himself when the devil possessing him is his own soul?

Vince Brusio: What served as the inspiration for this story? Did any particular books or films help give birth to this story and the corresponding visuals?

Phil Hester: Not really. I obsess about my failures as a human being quite a bit, so the idea that obsession could consume you, that it could take on its own life parallel to yours, inside yours, sounded frightening to me. I got very sick about two years ago and felt betrayed by my body, by its refusal to heal. I guess that sort of physical decay inspired me. I'm fine now, but that whole battle with my body was definitely a motivation to get this story out there.

Vince Brusio: What chemistry was worked out between both writer and artist? What ideas were shared? Give us the director's cut for how the mighty Phil Hester and Tony Harris came together to break bread so that Blood Blister would become a reality.

Phil Hester: Haha. Well, the idea has been around for a while. Aftershock wanted to do the book right out of the gate, but they knew they needed just the right artist for it. We needed someone who could convey realism and fantasy with equal assuredness. Tony is definitely that artist. We talk about ideas on the phone and it's like two fire hoses of crazy ideas blasting at each other at full force. It gets messy, but it's a glorious mess. I definitely push the story in directions I think Tony will excel at depicting. He designs pages so brilliantly that I'm always conscious of finding compelling imagery for him to go nuts on. Each issue of the book so far has featured a character I think only Tony could sell without seeming clichéd or ridiculous. I think all the best horror is right on the edge of being ludicrous. That makes it more unsettling to me. Tony knows exactly where that border between weird/goofy and weird/scary is. He freaking lives there!

Vince Brusio: If you could geek about a particular scene that you think would best encapsulate the heart and soul of this book, what would we see if you made that scene into a YouTube trailer?

Phil Hester: A man is lost in an amateur charity fundraiser-style haunted house. He is annoyed by the cheesy scares and feeble costumes until he wanders into a completely dark section of the maze-like house. He hears the distant crying of infants. As the crying grows louder he looks down to see a wriggling mass of deformed, blue-skinned fetuses crawling toward him, the dead children of a poisoned town he cheated out of their just due. The babies pin his legs as specters of their tumorous parents shuffle out of the dark grasping at his fine clothes. One pretty young woman, a homecoming queen missing her body below the waist, skitters over the carpet of babies and climbs up his torso to kiss him.

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Vince Brusio writes about comics, and writes comics. He is the long-serving Editor of PREVIEWSworld.com, the creator of PUSSYCATS, and encourages everyone to keep the faith...and keep reading comics.