After the first 100-plus pages of Red Room, I really hit my stride with the book you’re holding in your hands. I got comfortable with the universe I built. I can see different kinds of themes and patterns emerging over time that help nudge the narrative in its proper direction. These kinds of things are not always obvious when you set out to make a comic. Keeping the thought of trying to make a modern-day horror comic with a subject matter that was unavailable years before really opened the floodgates beyond cryptocurrency and the Dark Web. Maybe the clearest theme that’s unraveled is the construct of class hierarchy in many different forms and each issue (episode) in this volume looks at this theme at different angles. The lead-up story featuring the Rat Queens started with a simple germ of an idea: “Let’s see a complete red room video from start to end… and make it one of the crown jewels of this sick subculture.” Looking at it through the lens of class hierarchy you have the lowest class being the queens, who are looked at by everyone else as mere product. Davis Fairfield is a worker bee who has some success, but there are clearly people at the top and those people at the top do not get into any trouble when it’s all said and done. And then there are those pesky customers in the chat room who keep the entire ecosystem moving: super wealthy assholes who have their hands on the hamster feeder and want to be entertained for their money’s worth. The second tale, “Punkinz,” made me think of who the nouveau riche would be in this sick subculture. It would be copycats who exploit the “meme” of red rooms to their own ends. “Memes” on the internet have a kind of pyramid scheme quality to them, where the closest copycats share some big rewards as the derivatives continue to trickle down.
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