In Your Skin by Aditya Bidikar from Tiny Onion/Image Comics in April

Posted in: Comics, Image | Tagged: aditya bidikar, In Your Skin, tiny onion

In Your Skin #1 by Aditya Bidikar launches from Tiny Onion/Image Comics in April 2026

Aditya Bidikar is best known as a comic book letterer but in the past few years has been working with James Tynion IV’s Tiny Onion production house as part of their Artist in Residence program to create a new four-issue comic book series, In Your Skin, in which Bollywood body horror meets erotic fiction, and is being published by Image Comics in April. Aditya Bidikar posted in his newsletter, “This has been in the works for a while now (for years, really). I am absolutely delighted to announce the upcoming publication of my first longform comic as a writer, In Your Skin, with artist Som, colour artist Francesco Segala (assisted by Gloria Martinelli), designers Dylan Todd and Courtney Menard, and editor Eric Harburn.”

IN YOUR SKIN #1 (OF 4)

MINISERIES PREMIERE2026-04-22 | 40 PAGES • FC (FULL COLOR) | M | $4.99 USHORROR, SATIREPriyanka is a Bollywood uber-fan who has been obsessed with film star Ayesha Sen since she was a kid—she’s watched her movies over and over, and knows her dances beat for beat. But after a once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet her idol goes awry, and Ayesha announces her impending retirement from movies, Priyanka decides that if Ayesha isn’t going to live the life she’s supposed to, Priyanka would be more than happy to take over for her… Bollywood body horror meets erotic fiction in writer Aditya Bidikar’s debut series with rising star artist SOM (Crocodile Black), a twisted exploration of celebrity culture, identity, and image that’s perfect for fans of The Substance and David Cronenberg.STORY: ADITYA BIDIKARART: SOMCOVER A: SOMCOVER B: MARIA LLOVETCOVER C (1:10): ANAND RKCOVER D (1:25): TULA LOTAY

In Your Skin combines my love for body horror and my fascination with the glamorous world of Bollywood,” said Bidikar. “Backed by the incredible Tiny Onion team, Som and I are thrilled to present a story that’s never been seen before in comics… I posted about this on social media earlier today, and it’s been – as they say – popping off. I’m incredibly gratified by the excitement, and I can’t wait for everyone to see the magic Som and Francesco are creating on this. I’m going to be cagey about further details for the moment, but rest assured we’ll be talking about this one a lot on the blog in the run-up to its release. I’m incredibly pleased to be working with this team as well as Tiny Onion, and I can’t wait for the world to finally see this one. This is the book I’ve been talking about on the blog under the codename SEASIDE, so that codename is retired. Interested parties can go back through previous blogposts for hints of how this book came together.”

Well, let’s do that. Using the in-progress codeword style created by Warren Ellis, in 2022, Aditka Bidikar posted “I’ve started writing again too, after putting a solid two-month pause on that. I was in the middle of outlining a mini-series when I began my hiatus, and I had been stuck somewhere near the end of issue #1. I’ve been tinkering with that over the last couple of weeks. I revised it from the ground-up with ideas that had been percolating recently, and I now have a solid outline halfway through issue #3. Once I wrap up the full four-issue treatment, it’ll go to some friends for feedback, and I’ll give it a month or so before I start doing a first draft script and then, fingers crossed, approach an artist. It’s not a project I’ve mentioned here before, so, let me give it a codename. Hmm … CODENAME SEASIDE. That sounds about right.”

And over the past four years, we have had a number of updates. In 2023 we learned “Every afternoon… I’d fire up Ulysses and rewrite an issue of the beat sheet. Five issues over six days. It went faster than I’d expected – with the time away, the core of the story had solidified in my head, and I knew where I wanted to go with it. I think it’s turned out nice, and it’s lovely to come back after months and realise that I have an actual story, and that it’s good. Well, I think it’s good. I’ve kept it aside for a few days. I’ll give it a last read and polish in the coming week and then it goes to my first readers, who have been hearing about this one for years. I can’t wait to see what they think.”

It 2024, James Tynion IV came on board, “being invited to develop an original series with Tiny Onion as one of their Artists in Residence. More details will be announced as these projects take shape, but this part of the contract is both incredibly exciting to me, and a bit nerve-wracking. As you might know, I’ve been a career writer in a previous life, and have continued writing short stories and short comics on occasion, but now, as work and health have stabilised, I’ve wanted to come back to writing in a big way. Not to make it my primary career again – I love lettering too much for that, and I like being semi-retired – but to make stories that I really care about, that I feel compelled to tell. When James and Eric made their offer, I toyed with a few different ideas to present them, old and new. But from the start, I knew which book it had to be. I’ve been developing the book codenamed SEASIDE for the last couple of years, and when the offer came, I had a solid outline that I was about to present to an editor. Much more than any of my other ideas, this was the story that I was going to tell no matter what, and I knew that with the backing of Tiny Onion, I could give it the love and the diligence it deserved. It was a no-brainer, and thankfully, the TO gang agreed.”

Writing 12 pages a week, to stay on track, he wrote “I’m thinking that issue 1, estimated to be 32 pages, might end up at 36 or so. It’s been very hard work figuring out how to get all the visual and textual nuances down on a comics page – it’s a strangely unwieldy thing, very different from prose or films – but I’ve been having a ball, and I actually punched the air a few times when I managed to make a moment land precisely how I wanted it to. More than ever, this has reminded me how much I love comics, and how much I like being a student of the medium.”

And as artwork started to come in, “I’ve seen the inks on the test page, and they’re gorgeous. It’s being coloured right now, and I can’t wait to see the finished page. Now that the first page has been drawn and inked, it feels like work on this is properly underway (six months since I wrote the first page of script, and two months after we started working on character designs).”

Then there was the lettering, “since this is my first big project as a writer, I wanted to do something special as a letterer as well. So, quietly, for the last couple of weeks, usually when I’m on a long call with a friend, I’ve been developing a new typeface to letter the book with. It’s based on a hand-lettering style I developed a few years ago but haven’t been able to use in anything (there were a couple of hand-lettering projects on the horizon some years ago, but those didn’t work out). It’s the same pen shape that I used on Blue in Green, but the skeletons are inspired by Bill Oakley and Ken Lopez’s angular, forward-looking styles from the ’90s. I’m planning for three versions of each uppercase letter that will be auto-replaced using OpenType features, plus two sets of lowercase letters. (The book will mostly be lettered in uppercase, but I wanted to have the option to drop down to lowercase for whispers and smaller exclamations like I do in books like TOPLOCC – I enjoy the visual variation that gives the lettering. When I started scripting this book, I toyed with using multiple speech registers like some writers do – Hickman’s use of italics, Si Spurrier’s parentheticals and lowercase asides – but the book’s tone largely resisted that.)”

SOM added: “In Your Skin feels like a mirror that refuses to flatter. Body horror is not just an adornment but a tool for the biography of mutating ambitions in the seductive world of Bollywood, pairing the mundane with the grotesque. To have Tiny Onion back the project was massively reassuring! Hope this book scares and charms you in equal measure!” This twisted four-issue miniseries is set to launch in April from Image Comics, with covers from Maria Llovet, Tula Lotay, Anand RK and more.

In Your Skin #1 will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, April 22:

Cover A by SOM – Lunar Code 0226IM0317
Cover B by Llovet – Lunar Code 0226IM0318
Cover C 1:10 copy incentive by Anand RK – Lunar Code 0226IM0319
Cover D 1:25 copy incentive by Tula Lotay – Lunar Code 0226IM0320

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