Art and Pornography In Hans Rickheit's Comic The Gloaming

A VOCATION FOR EXPERIMENTATION

Hans Rickheit (born January 12, 1973) is an American cartoonist whose work is characterized by settings in vaguely defined periods, from the Victorian era to the 1950s, and by a dreamlike, disturbing atmosphere, often marked by body horror. Self-critical, Hans Rickheit describes his work as obscurantist, a term that highlights his refusal of easy explanations and his predilection for the enigmatic. Since adolescence, he had already shown a vocation for experimentation: at age 11, he produced his first photocopied minicomic and, while still in high school, published works reviewed in Factsheet Five. He briefly attended Marlboro College in Vermont but abandoned his academic studies to throw himself fully into the underground universe. In the 1990s, he immersed himself in the alternative scene of Cambridge, Massachusetts, living in the basement of the Zeitgeist Gallery, a space for performances, experimental music, and fringe art. There, he produced anthologies, posters, and his first comic book series, including Chrome Fetus.

He gained wider recognition in 2009 with The Squirrel Machine, published by Fantagraphics, a delirious graphic novel in which two brothers lose themselves in grotesque inventions and anatomical obsessions. The work solidified his meticulous style, with detailed black-and-white lines, evoking both the precision of an engraver and the feverish imagination of a surrealist. Other creations like Ectopiary and Cochlea & Eustachia expanded his repertoire, always oscillating between narrative and reverie, eroticism and absurdity.

In 2018, Rickheit launched The Gloaming, funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. The series, published in seven issues until 2023 and later collected in 2024 by Mansion Press, unabashedly assumed an adult and pornographic nature, becoming one of the most radical expressions of his work. While continuing to publish new Cochlea & Eustachia stories, Rickheit found in The Gloaming a territory to take the mix of eroticism, horror, and absurd comedy to the extreme.

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THE PLOT OF THE GLOAMING

How to define The Gloaming? A mix of pornography and a low-budget science fiction film? A horror story with comedy? Or simply an adaptation of Junji Ito's Tomie with a lot of explicit sex? Released between 2018 and 2023 in seven issues and later published in a single volume in 2024 by Mansion Press (a second volume was released in 2025 by the same publisher), The Gloaming surprises us with its plot of absurd situations that become increasingly uncontrollable as the narrative progresses. The story of The Gloaming can be described as a disturbing dive into the intersection of pornography, science fiction, and the grotesque. At first glance, the plot revolves around a mad scientist, an archetypal figure from fantasy literature, but here transfigured into an obsessive creator of clones programmed to serve as sex slaves. These clones live in a state of permanent arousal, unable to escape the programming that shapes them, reducing their existence to a cycle of compulsory pleasure.

However, Hans Rickheit does not limit himself to narrating a plot of domination and machinic desire. The comic presents a parallel narrative core: a race of alien sex clones, equally condemned to an incessant impulse to masturbate or offer pleasure to any creature that crosses their path. Within this universe, there is also an important subdivision: a group of four female clones who stand out from the rest of the group. Unlike the others, they seem to possess fragments of individuality, as if their programming has partially failed. Three of them are chaotic, animalistic, given over to desire and violence. The fourth, however, shows traces of rationality, albeit geared towards malice and small acts of transgression. This difference places her in a position of vulnerability before the others, like a kind of "profane Cinderella," constantly the target of her sisters' mockery. These four, for reasons still nebulous, inhabit a mansion that serves as the central setting of the narrative, a sort of baroque stage where the lines between discipline and libertinism are constantly blurred.

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Click HERE for an article on the erotic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie.

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