Thomas Ott

The artist's favourite technique is scratchboarding: “it makes images emerge from multiple layers of black ink by literally ‘scratching’ them with a nib, specifically a Japanese cutter.

[4] Some add that “despite his lines steeped in black humour, one would do him wrong to see them merely as a parody of the horror genre [...] Ott empathises with the underdogs and has a certain sensitivity to truly tragic stories.”[5] And again: “For years, the Swiss comic artist has been delivering the darkest visions of the absurd side of modern civilisation.”[6] In 2013, Ott released another new work after three years: Dark Country is the story of a nightmarish honeymoon and is a standalone adaptation of the 2008 film of the same name by screenwriter Tab Murphy and director and Hollywood actor Thomas Jane (The Punisher).

The other two founding members were former Celtic Frost bassist Martin Eric Ain (replaced by Monika Schori after his death in 2017)[8] and former Coroner drummer Markus "Marky" Edelmann.

[11] Ott taught for a decade at the Zurich University of the Arts, deciding “just before the first wave of the pandemic” to resign in order to work as an author and illustrator.

His latest work, The Forest (2022), is a “magnificent illustrated tale” in which Ott “manages to recount in his signature style, with extraordinary delicacy but without compromising on terror, the journey of a child facing and accepting the loss of a beloved person.”[3]