XXXIV: Interview with…Luana Vecchio

Luana Vecchio is an Italian comic book artist best known for her vibrant colors, manga influences and dream-like quality mixed with eroticism and horror. She first broke into the comic book scene drawing a short story for the Millarworld Annual 2017 published by Image Comics. She followed it up with Confidential Comics drawing the four part miniseries A Knight in Kansas City.

In 2020, she began to establish herself in the industry with work on Snow White Zombie Apocalypse and on the spin off Blood Covered King for Scout Comics. Simultaneously, she self-published her first solo project LOVESICK on Comixology Submit. Years later, this would go on to change her career.

Meanwhile in 2021, she began a series of collaborations with writer Wyatt Kennedy. It began with the short story Something for your M.I.N.D. which was featured in Heavy Metal. The following year, Vecchio published her first creator-owned comic with Kennedy- BOLERO, a five issue series at Image Comics. They again collaborated at Image with Gospel For a New Century, which was a series of shorts featured in the IMAGE! 30th Anniversary Anthology.

In October 2022 she returned to LOVESICK, this time bringing it to print with another collaboration at Image Comics. Originally concieved as a three issue short, the series was expanded to seven after becoming a massive cult hit. The same year, Luana recieved The 2022 Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award at San Diego Comic-Con. This was the perfect way to cap off a tremendous rise to comic stardom.

After concluding the first series of LOVESICK, Luana has worked for DC Comics on Harley Quinn: Black+White+Redder and a guest stint on Poison Ivy.

She is currently working on covers for most American publishers including Archie Comics, Oni Press, Sumerian Comics, Image Comics, Skybound, Vault Comics and Titan. Her next creator owned project will also be written and drawn by Luana, with release details announced soon!

Be sure to follow Luana at:
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Join us below as Luana fields some questions concerning her comics series LOVESICK, and the intensities of psychosexuality!

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Luana Vecchio

In Lovesick No. 3, Domino is framed alongside two inserts, one featuring some pills and the other, the pig masked man. She says that the return of the repressed feels as good as the two intensities of it, violence and ecstasy, suggesting that she can only enjoy them by retreating toward them, which means only in her imagination. What do you think is the reason for the tension between needing to enjoy (with others) but enjoying most (without others)? After all, she says “if only I was allowed to be repulsive without having to hide”…

Domino suffers from autassassinophilia, a paraphilia that arouses her at the thought of being in danger and dying. However, death happens only once, and despite all the extreme situations she has faced, she is still alive. To experience the thrill she craves, she can only take refuge in her fantasies.

By profession, Domino is a dominatrix: she kills and subdues her clients, embodying the image of an invincible, ruthless demon. Yet, within her, two opposing selves coexist: the dominatrix and the submissive. If she were to give in to the latter, the former would collapse. That’s why the only way she can satisfy her more vulnerable side is through imagination, creating scenarios where she surrenders completely until death, reaching the peak of pleasure.

With that statement, Domino is claiming the normalcy of seeking death as an escape from life, as a denied right in a society that deludes us into believing we are immortal. It is a complex concept, but at its core, it is the contrast between the instinct to dominate and the desire for annihilation.

In Issue no. 4, one finds the following quote: “The limitation of love is that you need an accomplice, your friend will know the libertine’s refinement is being executioner and victim”- aside from Salò, were there other direct film and literature influences for you? I note Blake as well. Reading the comic made me think of The Devils, School of the Holy Beast, Saint Maud, A Dark Song, May (2002), Raw… 

While working on LOVESICK, I watched a lot of exploitation films. Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Ms. 45 influenced me, but to me, films, comics, and books are simply fuel to keep my creativity alive. I’m not entirely sure how much they actually inspired me, but I do know that two titles truly made a difference: Salò and the novel American Psycho.

I included Blake as a tribute to my favorite comic, Kraven’s Last Hunt. I couldn’t leave it out—I first read it when I was sixteen, and it made me realize that comics can tell immense stories, ones that stay with you forever.

When I read Issue no. 5, I couldn’t help but wonder that the role of the lover, confident, scapegoat, and victimiser seem to collapse in Jack. In the scene where they’re in the bathtub after killing an ostensibly consenting victim, the same scene where they exchange death drives and how it is they want to die, Jack says “eating someone who has offered themselves to you is the most intimate gesture two human beings can share”. This is in and around a discussion that seems very unintimate - from Jack saying that the taste of flesh is only “alright”, versus the very detailed fantasy of dying in a “cannibal snuffie” shown to her parents to elicit a particular relief and horror Domino offers. Is Jack, as the accomplice, merely fulfilling what he sees as a role-the cannibal gateway through which one can pass to a higher intensity but not necessarily a higher intimacy? Jack says it’s a fair exchange, but I’m not so sure…Are intensity and intimacy cross cancelling?

I think Jack is right: there is a fair exchange between him and Domino. Domino wants to stop living and uses Jack to achieve this, while he wants to eat her. They both get what they desire by using each other. Seen this way, their dynamic is quite balanced, which is why it's hard to see Domino as a complete victim and Jack as merely an opportunist.

There is a deep sense of intimacy between them in that scene: they are naked in a bathtub, openly discussing their desires, revealing their vulnerabilities. It’s a moment that truly connects them. Of course, their relationship is more complex than that, but when I wrote that scene, I wanted Jack to open up to Domino. It is also the moment when he gives her a name, a crucial act that binds them even further.

There are so many interesting things taking place in Issue no. 5. I can phrase one of them as a question: If biting Domino just makes her squirt, as Jack says, what is it that these men continually misunderstand about the difference and relationship between pain, pleasure, violence, intimacy, and being hurt?

I believe female desires are often misunderstood, especially when they are as extreme as Domino’s. There is still very little discussion about female desire, and women are often perceived as passive in sex—receiving rather than actively participating.

Domino’s awareness of her violent desires is unsettling, even to Jack and his cannibal friends. The idea of a victim who knowingly seeks her own fate is terrifying. Domino represents a form of female sexual liberation that doesn’t have to be seen as purely positive or negative—it simply exists. And it’s time to talk about it.

Something struck me quite forcefully when reading Issue no. 6. Nikki Giovanni once said to James Baldwin that she doesn’t care about the truth in a relationship if that truth is the giving of only the minimum one has. Instead, she’d prefer a faking, a counterfeiting, a performance of much more, that love isn’t enough without the performance of love to feel truly like love despite its non-artificial impossibility. In Issue no. 6, there’s a visual reference to Antonioni’s Blowup which gives a pretty accurate frame for Domino and Jack’s relationship. It seems that it is only possible as a performance, framed as such, indirect, in reference, withdrawn into the gesture. Is their relationship based on a shared appreciation for compatible (and compatibly intense) performances as opposed to who each really is? Or is it that the performance must be invested in, fully, as a precondition of trust, let alone the revelation of the truth (Domino telling Jack that it is the feeling of worthlessness and abandonment that she finds stimulating, that Jack is the one to provide that should Domino subscribe to his Italian cinema inflected fantasies)?

That’s a complex question. I think Jack and Domino are more in love with the idea they have of each other than with who they truly are. They are drawn to what they hope to gain from their relationship, which makes their bond inherently tragic.

At that point in the story, Jack is infatuated with what Domino could become under his guidance. Domino, on the other hand, wants him by her side because she has no one else and desperately needs love. But who they really are doesn’t seem to matter to either of them.

Their relationship evolves throughout the story, and after the flashback, we see a Domino who needs support and a Jack who idealizes her without truly acknowledging her suffering. He lets her fall apart, believing she is invincible.

Their bond is a mix of work, need, and personal gain. Too many factors are at play, and both of them are too consumed by their own desires to truly understand each other or connect on a human level. In the end, I think they have both lost touch with reality and their own humanity.

Consumption, interiority, egress and ingress and transgress and satisfaction and its impossibility. In Issue no. 7, Jack, addled, says he wants to eat a piece of Domino, not all of her. Is this how paraphilia must exist, how it must sustain itself, carefully and perhaps even secretly, piecemeal? Or reject itself entirely? Or consume itself entirely, bones and all, so to speak? In other words, are these the only three options of how to be a paraphiliac of this intensity? Is one eye enough, in other words, for Domino to feel let in, together, with Jack? Is one eye enough to prove to Jack that Domino would do anything for him, seeing that she in fact doesn’t give him her eye and Jack cannot consume - and in so doing -  assume her power…?

In Lovesick, love and desire are consumed through death. Jack and Dom’s relationship can only be truly complete if Domino’s desire for death is fulfilled. However, by the time this moment arrives, Jack decides he won’t eat her—he cannot live in a world without her. Eating only a small part of her becomes a symbolic act of union between them.

I’ve always seen Jack eating Domino’s eye as a form of penetration—she enters him, sending him into ecstasy. As you said, it’s an act of devotion and trust, yet it remains an unfulfilled desire. Jack will not consume Domino, and their love will forever remain incomplete.