Original Horror Folklore The World Needs Right Now — Reviewing ‘Lands Unknown: The Skinless Man’ #1

Welcome to the table,

The Skinless Man has warlocks, a skinless man, a magic baby, and a witch telling stories. We have so much to be worried about right now. Every day brings fresh atrocities that flood into our brains from every source, great and small. In these truly troubling times, I reach for the things that keep magic alive in the world; things that bring us wonder and take us from this hellscape into Lands Unknown.

Let’s get into it.

Ben Stenbeck helms this brilliant story as both the writer and the artist, with colors by Dave Stewart and letters by, you guessed it, the man who letters 95% of the books on my current reading list, Clem Robins.

There is a kind of story I gravitate towards. It comes from a lifetime of reading dime-store novels full of stories where Conan, Solomon Kane, or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser wander off into some unhinged landscape only to find new and fascinating creatures and foes around every corner.

These stories of wonder and mystery, the ones that feel like they have nightmares lurking around the edges in an almost dreamy bedtime-story sort of way, are where Lands Unknown: The Skinless Man dwells.

Built as a layered story, the tale starts with The Red-Haired God Killer, and his animal companions, a large hound and rabbit, who, while on the hunt for the enigmatic Skinless Man, seek shelter in the home of a giant witch.

Everything about the first few pages of this book is full of worldbuilding wonder. The animal companions can speak with the “God Killer,” the rafters of the witch’s home are draped with thousands of bones, and the witch herself is wearing a walrus skin, including its head, as a barnacle-covered shawl, giving each line the feeling that what we are reading has been very intentional crafted to draw us into this world, much in the way the witches story of El Kubra, the Skinless Man has been crafted to draw in the “God Killer” and his companions.

The story the witch weaves is of a sunken ship whose spoils are pillaged by El Kubra. Within the treasures, they find a small baby with golden eyes, and the sight of this child makes El Kubra think there may be a way for him to take the child’s skin, solving an issue he has been dealing with since his own strange birth.

It’s a brilliant setup, and it only gets better as a council of warlocks is employed to figure out how to make such a thing possible. The warlocks send El Kubra on a fools errand to find a giant. While he is away, the warlocks show their deceitful nature, attempting to use the child with golden eyes for their own magical ends.

<<Spoilers Follow>>

This goes poorly, and the whole homeland of El Kubra is soon beset by plague after plague until the streets are red with blood and the warlocks have fallen to rot, decay, and worse.

El Kubra returns with a giant he has freed in tow, only to find seemingly everyone in his lands dead. He is soon ambushed by a shapeshifting werehyena-type creature known within these pages as a Kymbatu.

This is one of the most brilliant moments in this issue as it shows Stenbeck’s honed grasp of worldbuilding. El Kubra removes the leg from a deadman, cleaves flesh from bone until the bone is left bare, and uses the sharp bone’s edge as a weapon to plunge into the creature to slay it.

This is something that those of his party armed with conventional weapons are not able to accomplish.

Lands Unknown: The Skinless Man is a brilliant blending of horror and original folklore crafted exquisitely by Ben Stenbeck’s honed storytelling aptitudes and stunning sequential skills.

Until next time, I have no idea where this story is going. I am honestly a bit sad we only have two issues to enjoy. In my heart of hearts, it’s my hope that this is but the beginning of a larger landscape of stories dealing with the Skinless Man, as I am here for whatever comes next.