Josh Simmons – författare

Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland, Jessica Farm opens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse. Once inside, we track our titular heroine (she is a person, not a place) as she bounds out of bed on Christmas morning and goes about her routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread as we discover that Jessica's increasingly nightmarish house - where the inside seems bigger than the outside, like Snoopy's doghouse - is filled with creatures around every corner: some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing, and some malevolent. Most terrifying of all is Jessica's father. Will she even get to open the presents under the Christmas tree? Taking place over a single Christmas Day, Jessica Farm is a career-spanning comics project in which Simmons has been drawing one page every month for the past 24 years, starting in January 2000. This is a horror-fantasy-psychodrama that will appeal to fans of Charles Burns, David Cronenberg, and Dario Argento.

Hot on the heels of his first graphic novel, House, Josh Simmons' Jessica Farm fuses serialised adventure, fantasy and psychological horror and stamps it with his signature macabre sensibility in this atmospheric new work. This is the first volume of a life-spanning comics project in which Simmons drew one page every month for the past seven years, starting in January 2000, and will continue for 50 years in total, making up the story as he goes and releasing 96-page increments every eight years until he amasses a 600-page body of work.