In Your Skin #3: Ripped and Torn

The wheels are starting to come off for Ayesha and Priyanka, and the pavement faded away miles back. As the women dive deeper and deeper into each other’s lives, the walls of their sanity continue to erode into nothing.

It’s hard to know what to make of a story like In Your Skin. It’s more than just a tale of body swapping. It’s a story about obsession, fame, and just how tied we are to our identity as well as what happens when we start to lose it. Priyanka and Ayesha are both at the ends of their rope, but in this they are also weird fun house mirrors of each other that can express emotions the other kept locked away. Priyanka channels Ayesha’s rage and disillusion with the Bollywood glitz and glamour around her, while Ayesha anguishes on Priyanka’s horror at being perceived as no one with poor Nachicet (Priyanka’s boyfriend) caught in the middle of all of it. All of this collides into a very horrific and depressing display of blood, gore, and transformation.

Aditya Bidikar turns up the volume another notch and the story is all the better for it. He accurately portrays these two women spiraling out of control and how it is reverberating outward to everyone around them. There are genuine moments of fear, but also relatability as things go further and further left.

Somnath Pal’s haunting art continues to match the script beat for beat, reaching some of the story’s most gruesome visuals to date. The last page alone is enough to give you nightmares for a couple of days. Francesco Segala’s wonderfully moody colors also give the lines that extra pop that make the book such an effective reading experience.