Lifeblood

This weird story was published in Heavy Metal magazine in Summer, 2002. It was written by

Michael O'Connell, who most likely contacted Seth at Comic Con a year or two earlier. The story has some similarities with the novel The Collector by John Fowles. It is about a woman who, through some sort of laboratory mishap, has come to need to ingest blood through her skin to stay alive. So she kidnaps a guy she meets in a bar and chains him to the bed in her basement apartment in order to draw blood from him when she needs it.

It is entirely set in this dreary basement apartment, with two characters only, one of whom can only move slightly, as he is chained in place. The claustrophobic setting and narrow story form a huge challenge for an artist, especially Seth who liked to make every scene different from every other one. I suspect that the challenge was one of the reasons he accepted this assignment.

Looking over the pages, I believe Seth did pretty well in making each frame different from the others. He shows the action, such as it is, from many different points of view. This title page shows the room from a point of view above the ceiling right over the toilet. He amused himself by showing not only what a bug on the ceiling would see, but detaching the room from the house and drawing in also the cinder blocks inside the walls.

I remember when Seth was working on this story. He was living here in San Diego at the time. It may have been just after Willworld; I think it was during the summer. He showed me, but didn't say much about this work; eventually he maybe found it just not that interesting.