When did you get this published? The atmosphere, especially with the white dude on the train reminds me of the late 80′s (a decade I don’t look back upon with nostalgia).

I remember once, that the older brother of a school friend of mine had moved in in an apartment upstairs in our sleazy neighborhood in Copenhagen. He came by to say hi one Saturday night and brought a bottle of whisky. There were about five or six of us already hanging out.

We thought he was an OK guy until he started to tell us about the years he had spent in South Africa. He insisted that our media had gotten the facts all twisted, and that we were all misinformed in anything we thought we knew about South Africa.

He also added that Nelson Mandela was in fact a psychopath, and just went on and on. He kind of scared us, since he was clearly brainwashed and (we decided) potentially dangerous. We told him to leave, kept the whisky and never invited him again. Apartheid and the cold war are two things that stand out to me when I think about the 80s.

Sounds like my ’80s Apartheid encounter was a lot shorter than yours, but at least you got free booze. In addition to drunken art school parties and MTV News, a major influence on me at the time was Sue Coe’s “How to Commit Suicide in South Africa” . In fact, the cover is a background element of the very next page (4th panel, under the character’s foot). By this time, Springsteen, Bono and a few others were loudly not playing Sun City. Ahh, those mighty ’80s.

As to your first question, “The Bleeding Mirror” was originally published in a horror anthology called Gore Shriek (Issue 5, Fantaco Enterprises, Tom Skulan, Publisher). I was trying to get into another issue of Steve Bissette’s TABOO, but Tom really wanted this story.