Answering mail in regards to “Vacuum Horror”

I read about a week ago and I was blown away to be honest. That little intro paragraph in the beginning was so dope. Did you have any kind of metaphorical reasoning for using Abe Lincoln as the president? Or the decision he makes in the first couple pages about dissolving all laws? I thought the first half of the comic was so awesomely fucked up. I’ve never heard/read/seen a more penetrating depiction of a pedophile before. When he said that line about remembering giving his daughter a bath and “how painful it was to see such beauty”, it knocked the air out of me. That page in particular is gonna haunt me for a while. Thank you, Cam

Aaron $hunga:

Abe Lincoln started appearing in my mind as a perfect catalyst for a pandemic, because he is such a solid fixture in Americana that he reads as inhuman, half person half symbol, a letter in a nationalistic alphabet.  He’s like a stop sign.  I thought it was interesting that simultaneously low-brow success story Mark Ryden also began using Abe Lincolns in his paintings.  There was something about that early 2000’s period that everyone regarded all things “Classic” to be reduced to something as neutral or interchangeable as hieroglyphs.

Admittedly I was meditating on the book 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade while working on this book.  In the philosophical discourse of our French Haute Culture Jabba Da Hut’s masterpiece we see himdecrying the fallacy of monogamy, true love, and rationale.  He also condones and argues in favor of pedophilia.  It is in these texts where the inspiration for the first half of Vacuum Horror come from.  Also, I use this feeling, the purest evil, to describe what suburban American existence entails. 

Of course I don’t ultimately feel that way, but when I was 21 it seemed to make more sense.  Pushing around a library cart for a living, listening to Morbid Angel, and avoiding all forms of human interaction can give you a darker perspective.

Now that I’m 29, I have a more positive outlook.  My next goal is to find a nice woman who wants to let me strangle her unconscious and leave her in an alley covered in my semen.

  1. ashunga posted this