Skin Police #1 is now on stands, and it is a wild mix of sci-fi and action movie tropes, with a touch of body horror — though writer Jordan Thomas might disagree with the latter assessment. Naturally, he’s not wrong, though the premise of the new Oni Press series certainly lends itself to the moniker.
In the book, we enter a world where clones have been created using their “parents” skin — but they don’t know they are clones until they go mad and start killing people. Enter an elite unit dedicated to sniffing them out and taking them down, derisively called Skin Police.
“I think it’s the best title I’ve ever come up with,” Thomas told Comic Book Club over email. “It is gross, and unsettling, and intriguing, and then also works on a story level, these agents are judging who is human and hunting them down.”
To find out more about the inspiration behind the book, as well as what’s next, read on.
Comic Book Club: Hard-hitting question first: why skin, specifically? Is it because it’s gross?
Jordan Thomas: I think it’s the best title I’ve ever come up with. It is gross, and unsettling, and intriguing, and then also works on a story level, these agents are judging who is human and hunting them down.
More seriously, there are a lot of different influences at play here. I’d love to hear what you were inspired by, if anything.
Certainly Blade Runner was a launching point. I love both the movie and the book it was based on but it’s a very focused one off story of an agent hunting down one group of escaped replicants. So, I started thinking about what the larger world in that story could be like, a world where there were thousands of potentially dangerous clones out there instead of a handful. After that I also took a lot of inspiration from European history to build out how this future Europe could function, as history does tend to repeat itself.
Visually I was always looking for something with a Moebius/European vibe and luckily in Daniel Gete we found an artist who could nail that whilst also bringing his own style to the party.
This clearly exists in the realm of, or adjacent to, body horror. Why were you drawn to the genre?
To be honest the body horror vibe isn’t really something that’s present throughout the series. The cover on issue 1 for instance is a metaphor for the story and Eckis’ reputation as the top dupe catcher/killer when we first meet him. The horror in our story is much more psychological, although I am a fan of body horror and definitely enjoy playing with it in Skin Police as a way to convey some of what our characters are experiencing.
You’ve got the tired veteran cop and the bright-eyed rookie as our stars… What’s the appeal of this dynamic?
Eckis isn’t too tired quite yet, he’s pretty much in his prime as the best ever DIC, or if you want to insult them Skin Police, agent and Corfer is very much the star of her class rookie and I think that a character like that is always useful to act as a kind of surrogate for the audience as things are new to them the same way they are to the reader who has been plunged into this world. However, it is always fun to write that natural conflict between the established officer and the newbie, but they are both incredibly capable individuals.
Similarly, I’ve really enjoyed your work but this seems to be more accessible than, say, Weird Work, which pushed the boundaries of narrative. Was that the goal here? Obviously you’re dealing with some big ideas at the same time, don’t get me wrong.
I’m not one to write cynically, so I don’t consider things like accessibility or what else is popular when I come up with ideas, although of course that has a big impact in what ideas get picked up by publishers as they do need to think about whether something will sell or not. Definitely I think this series is the closest thing to what mainstream comics readers seem to like – visceral action, government conspiracies, bloody violence and wild future settings – and so I’m very excited to see the reaction we get and then hopefully it attracts some new readers to my work and they come to really enjoy the deeper human elements that underpin the story we’re telling. They’re buried under a whole heap of bodies and bloodshed but they are there!
What’s it like working with Daniel Gete? How has his art impacted your writing?
I love working with Daniel, he is a truly astonishing artist. Skin Police is unusual as I wrote it before we had an artist onboard, so in a way it was about finding the perfect artist for the scripts I’d written, which required the ability to be able to handle frenetic action, huge amounts of world building and the ability to deal with double-figure panel pages in a way that appears effortless but most certainly isn’t and Daniel delivered above and beyond on all these aspects. The fact that Daniel is Spanish and studied architecture is another huge plus for the design of our future Europe world.
What can you tease about the series coming up?
Every issue of Skin Police has a great, generally action-orientated, main story that plays out whilst at the same time the wider story is building piece-by-piece in the background, so hopefully as single issues the series is a very satisfying read as well as the story as a whole.
We have some pretty wild and messed up stuff in store, but I think the craziest is probably the issue where our agents have to raid an illegal underground UFC style dupe-fight club – that one gets pretty bonkers!
Skin Police #1 is now on stands from Oni Press.
