I had a nice visit earlier today from someone local who’d bought a ring and needed it resized, but it turned out that instead of a resize we just swapped it out for the Transmetropolitan-inspired Spider Jerusalem ring. That reminded me that I recently read a comic I wanted to mention here.
There’s a wonderful and award winning series called Locke & Key (published by IDW — you can also find them on Amazon, and I wouldn’t mention that if I didn’t think they were worth paying for) about a group of kids whose New England mansion has a bunch of keys with various supernatural powers, from doorways that can take you anywhere, to keys that can flip your gender and keys that open your head so you can rearrange your — or someone else’s — mind, to locks that protect us from a demon filled world desperate to spill into ours. I really can’t recommend it highly enough. I’ve read every issue and anxiously await the next. I should mention that it’s not suitable for children though.
To my great surprise, in the fourth series (out of five so far) — Clockworks — issue three contains a touching commentary on tattoos and self-harm. The main comic is written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, but occasionally they run a short mini-comic at the end called “Kinsey’s Komic Korner!”, Kinsey being one of the characters in the main story. That said, it’s all totally unrelated to the main storyline of Locke & Key so I think what’s going on is the authors are simply fans (perhaps I should say Kinsey is a fan) — these mini-comics are done by Kate Leth of Kate or Die, and you’ll also find this comic — and many more wonderful short illustrated stories — in her comics archive at KateOrDieComics.com (including some others about tattoos that all of us will find familiar).
(CLICK AND ZOOM IN)
By the way, Kate Leth mentions that it “scared the living hell out of me to put on the internet”, so I wanted to give her a lot of credit for doing so, and sharing something that makes one feel very alone even though it is an extremely common issue.
4 Comments
Just wanted to say I really liked the comic and Kate Leth is definitely not alone! It’s always comforting to hear someone else speak to candidly about self-harm.
Absolutely resonant with me. So brave and so true!
I think that’s great that Kate Leth has tattoos that make her feel beautiful after her sickness. But I think it should be noted that most of us tattooed people simply like tattoos (or as I remember you saying years ago, Shannon, perhaps we are answering some intrinsic primitive urge). I started getting tattooed because I wanted to. 14 years later, still getting tattooed, still loving my tattoos, and the motivation has never changed. I just love tattoos for their own sake. That’s it.
Yes Jon I think you make a VERY important point. A point that is doubly important thanks to all the LA Ink type shows — and BME as well — that have hammered in the idea that tattoos/mods very often have a profound story attached. That point has been made so well that many people assume that there HAS TO be a profound story.
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