Controversial ‘Red Room’ variant cover won’t be published

Fantagraphics, Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg decide not to release a cover that parodies Art Spiegelman’s cover to ‘Maus.’

A variant cover for the third issue of Ed Piskor’s “splatterpunk” comic series Red Room: Trigger Warning has been cancelled by its publisher, Fantagraphics, and the creators involved.

The cover, for Red Room: Trigger Warnings #3, was one of several covers that debuted in a post at The Beat yesterday — which they’ve since removed. It parodied Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the multiple award-winning autobiographical comic about his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It’s not the kind of comic that would be a good idea to parody on a splatterpunk gore comic, given the subject matter or the recent controversy in Tennessee.

The backlash on Twitter was swift, with a tweet from artist Ramon Villalobos garnering several responses from other comics creators. His tweet also includes an image of the cover in question.

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Fantagraphics to publish Ed Piskor’s ‘Red Room’

The comic series will be 12 issues of ‘subversive, stand alone stories that are all part of a larger, twisted narrative.’

Hip Hop Family Tree creator Ed Piskor will debut his first creator-owned, shared universe in a new comic, Red Room, which debuts in May from Fantagraphics.

“Red Room is a cyberpunk, outlaw, splatterpunk comic that you can’t unsee once you feast your eyes on the mayhem,” said Piskor in a press release. “Think of Red Room as modern day E.C. Comics, infused with the dream of Black Mirror. These are subversive, stand alone stories that are all part of a larger, twisted narrative.”

Piskor has been sharing pages from the new project on his Patreon, where he describes it as an “epic in the funnybook tradition of Faust, The Crow and other comics that make parents nervous.

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