BTTM FDRS
Staff Reviews
A socially-conscious horror story of the sort that's come to dominate the genre in the wake of Get Out, BTTM FDRS brings likable, humorous, flawed characters, and a fresh combination of cartoony art with vivid body horror.
Description
An Afrofuturist horror-comedy about gentrification, hip hop, and cultural appropriation.
Once a thriving working class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, the “Bottomyards” is now the definition of urban blight. When an aspiring fashion designer named Darla and her image-obsessed friend, Cynthia, descend upon the neighborhood in search of cheap rent, they soon discover something far more seductive and sinister lurking behind the walls of their new home. Like a cross between Jordan Peele’s Get Out and John Carpenter’s The Thing, Daniels and Passmore’s BTTM FDRS (pronounced “bottomfeeders”) offers a vision of horror that is gross and gory in all the right ways. At turns funny, scary, and thought provoking, it unflinchingly confronts the monsters—both metaphoric and real—that are displacing cultures in urban neighborhoods today.
Praise for BTTM FDRS
Passmore and Claytan Daniels teaming up is a dream combination.
— Nerdist
I fell in love with this comic right about page one, and then just kept falling. The story is smart, the characters feel lively and real, and the art is moody and lovely. One hell of a winning recipe. Gentrification horror at its finest.
— Victor LaValle - The Changeling
BTTM FDRS is a brilliant meteor of a graphic novel, and I’m pretty sure when it comes into your life, you won’t know what hit you. Vibrantly drawn and perfectly paced, this comic is as compelling to read as the story is necessary to hear. Simultaneously delivering visceral horror, cutting satire, and a nuanced interrogation of urban gentrification.
— Edie Fake - Eisner Award-Winner, Gaylord Phoenix
Daniels and Passmore bring their satirical acumen and sense of the macabre aspects of society to their first collaboration. The medium is the monster and the mastery of its use are utterly apparent in this powerful sequential manifesto.
— John Jennings - NYT best-selling author and Eisner-winning scholar/artist
Creepy and charming, BTTM FDRS mashes up oozy, sick horror and dark, politically barbed comedy. It does all this with a cast of distinctive characters, funny, stinging dialogue, and moments of queasiness built around a body horror conceit: that of a building that literally gets inside your guts. It’s one of a kind.
— Charles Hatfield - Eisner-winning comics scholar
BTTM FDRS is a savvy, albeit grisly, comic urban monster story for the social media generation.
— Publishers Weekly
The brightly hued, visually compelling panels provide an electrifying feel to each page.
— Chicago Reader
BTTM FDRS is a horror comic, an amplification of new voices, a meditation on trends in urbanization, a Goonies-type adventure, a look at female and cross-racial friendship, a beautiful visual examination of lumpiness and more, all moderated by a skeptical sense of humor.
— Paste
BTTM FDRS drags up our culture's biggest, ugliest globs of unconscious sewage and spreads it across a white page for us to see and acknowledge.
— PopMatters
A coy, gruesome satire of gentrification.
— Hyperallergic
Passmore composes some very striking images, and a high-intensity color palette adds an extra pop to the linework.
— The A.V. Club
Daniels and Passmore make horror feel vital again.
— Broken Frontier
At turns funny, scary, and thought provoking, BTTM FDRS is a uniquely striking graphic novel that offers a vision of horror that is gross and gory in all the right ways.
— Midwest Book Review
Brilliant, striking, unique, compelling, and just a damn good read, BTTM FDRS is a triumph.
— San Francisco Book Review
Gentrification horror and sociopolitical satire play out with sharpness in this visually brilliant thriller set in a fictional Chicago South Side community.
— Washington Post
A savage Afrofuturistic horror comedy about gentrification, racial invisibility, and cultural appropriation in knock-your-eyes-out, 'non-literal' coloring.
— Library Journal
Daniels and Passmore have created a funny, creepy, acid-toned satire about the horrors of gentrification.
— Chicago Public Library
