Of Tenants And Tentacles: 'BTTM FDRS' Confronts Gentrification In Comic Horror Form
Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore's new graphic novel is a comic-horror take on the very real problem of gentrification that follows two young artists moving to a struggling Chicago neighborhood.
When young urbanites move into poor neighborhoods in search of cheap rents and local color, they often get more than they bargained for. What they don't usually get are body parts spilling over toilet bowl rims and face-eating tentacles crawling out of ventilation systems. That's the kind of visceral revenge meted out in BTTM FDRS, Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore's comedic horror comic. Daniels, who wrote BTTM FDRS, and Passmore, who illustrated it, wanted to distill the complex politics of gentrification into digestible (well, really fairly indigestible) form.
Daniels told me that gentrification was on his mind a lot when he began the project. "I think it's the same with a lot of
