They say you pour your blood, sweat and tears into any creative project. Well, forget about the sweat and tears, because writer Dave Hill is putting his actual, for real blood into a Human Blood Variant cover for Oni Press’s upcoming Dark Regards.
The “Human Blood Variant” is, thankfully, “highly limited” according to Oni, and will be available as a 1:50 cover illustrated by Hill himself. But wait, it’s not just his blood! It also includes the blood of editor Karl Bollers, and Oni President & Publisher Hunter Gorinson in what we’ll call some sort of “blood soup.”
“I started the original Witch Taint emails purely to entertain myself late at night while sitting around in my underwear,” said Hill via press release. “I never intended for anyone else to ever see them. But eventually I showed a couple friends and soon after there was an entire website dedicated to the emails at theblackmetaldialogues.com, where suddenly the whole world could read them. That led to me talking with Malcolm Gladwell about Witch Taint on his podcast. The next thing I know, I’m in the back of some strange van where some guy is jabbing my arm so he can put my actual blood into a comic book about the whole thing. My life is a mess.”
As Gorinson notes in the release, this is far from the first time human… stuff… has been mixed into comic book covers. Kiss famously mixed their blood into the ink for the 1977 Marvel Treasury Edition. And Mark Greunwald, per his dying wishes, had his ashes mixed into the printing for the trade paperback of Squadron Supreme. I’ve also sneezed on a lot of comics, which is why I’m no longer allowed inside most Midtown Comics locations.
“Ever since I first read about that in a letter column in Wizard Magazine in 1993, I have been looking for a copy … and waiting, patiently biding my time, until Oni Press would be presented with a series so extreme, so hilarious, so incalculably hardcore as to warrant the same treatment,” Gorinson said, of the Kiss cover. “Now, Dave Hill and Artyom Topilin are on the cusp of fulfilling that prophecy with DARK REGARDS #1 – and, through the dark power of multiple Non-Disclosure Agreements, we have figured out how to do the near-impossible: put real-life human blood into a comic book cover.”
Oni Press will, of course, document the process of mixing blood into the covers on their social media outlets, so stay tuned.
Dark Regards #1 hits comic book shops on May 13, but you can check out the blood variant (minus the blood, I couldn’t figure out how to get that on a website), as well as three unlettered, interior pages, below.
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