Ram V and Joëlle Jones team for horror in Through Red Windows comic

Horror comic fans will get a windfall this October with Through Red Windows, a new series from the combined and formidable talents of writer Ram V (The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, Detective Comics) and artist Joëlle Jones (Wonder Girl, Lady Killer), published by Dstlry.

“Through Red Windows has been an exercise in [sowing] discomfort,” Jones told Polygon via email.

The series follows up-and-coming financier Athul Laal, who accepts an invitation to live in his plutocratic mentor’s 73-story Manhattan residence and office building. Then, as Jones put it, “chaos and viscera” ensue.

Ram V said the series grew from his love of Edgar Allan Poe, and from making a lot of friends in the architecture department during college, which instilled in him a fascination for altered reality within highly designed spaces.

“Psycho-geography has also been an ongoing obsession of my work,” Ram told Polygon via email. “The high-rise element of this story comes from there. I’d also been interested in telling a story that looked at wealth, old wealth as a sort of Eldritch Entity with eternal self-perpetuation as a motive. And I’d wanted to tell a story of the dehumanizing nature of modern day ambition, especially as I see it in the nouveau riche, Indian entrepreneur.”

“The business aesthetic is inherently harsh and desaturated; greys, whites, blacks, and navy blues set around right angles,” Jones said of her work on the series. “It’s incredibly austere. Having that contrast against the eldritch and supernatural has been a fantastic challenge and a lot of fun—it’s injecting chaos and viscera into a design that relies on uniformity and perfection. Hopefully you’ll never read another comic like it.”

Jones shared two pages of strikingly colored interior art from the upcoming first issue. [Ed. note: The pages contain a depiction of suicide.]

Image: Ram V, Joëlle Jones/Dstlry

Image: Ram V, Joëlle Jones/Dstlry

Through Red Windows will be told in longer than usual 48-page installments, starting with Through Red Windows #1 this October, available for preorder or digital purchase direct from Dstlry. Keep reading for the official summary of the first issue, and a look at the main and variant covers by Jones.

When ailing Plutocrat, Harlan Roderick, invites his young protégé Athul Laal to live at Roderick Place in downtown Manhattan, what Athul believes this to be his first step into the inner circle of the world’s elite, soon turns into a living nightmare. Athul discovers that Harlan and his illness are inextricably connected to the 73-story building, in which, behind each door, lie secrets and monsters from both Harlan and Athul’s own lives.

Laal’s ambition gets the better of him and the higher he climbs in the company (and the building!) the deeper and darker becomes the danger to his life….and maybe his soul.

Image: Joëlle Jones/Dstlry

Image: Joëlle Jones/Dstlry