I’ve always been a little bit too fascinated with Serial Killers.
I went to high school about fifteen blocks away from the apartment building where Jeffrey Dahmer killed all those people, just a little over a decade after the last killings had taken place. I had good friends in High School whose parents had had some small involvement in his story, both through the press or the legal side of things. And when friends and I talked about Dahmer in hushed voices, we always talked about Ed Gein, too. The Wisconsin Serial Killer who inspired both PSYCHO and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
And then there was the fact that I watched Silence of the Lambs for the first time when I was twelve years old (my mom unsuccessfully attempted to cover my eyes during the Scary bits), which kicked off a lifelong fascination with Hannibal Lecter and the stories around him.
But in that fascination, there was something darker lurking. My own strange relationship with my sexuality which I was starting to piece together as an adolescent. You have to remember that in the late 90s and early 00s, it was easy to have a media diet in which gay people just didn’t exist. And when they did, it was usually as a punchline, and rarely as a three-dimensional character. I think I watched the Kevin Kline movie IN & OUT three times when my Mom rented it, without my family realizing I was going back over and over.
But most of the time I was engaging with queerness in media it was through the lens of monsters. Through sexual deviance. And there was a strange tie to Serial Killers. To the idea of the person who looked like everybody else, but there was something WRONG in them. Something twisted, that would grow into something uncontrollable and dangerous and hurt people around them.
Even now, in my mid-thirties, I’m still navigating my relationship with my own queerness. It’s nothing quite so dire as the dark thoughts of a young gay teenager reading about Jeffrey Dahmer on a Geocities website, but it’s not always the clean, clear affirmative relationship that a lot of queer fiction portrays. I wanted to dig into my ugliest feelings and see what kind of art would come from that.
Sometimes, it still feels like there’s something wrong with me. Sometimes, in a story with the monster, I see myself more in the monster than I do in the ordinary people. So I wanted to take all of those deep and uncomfortable feelings and use them as the building blocks for a horror comic. A serial killer story, with no supernatural elements. My love letter to Thomas Harris, and David Fincher, and all of the formative works that needled their way into my impressionable young brain.
The Deviant is also a Christmas Story.
That’s why it’s coming out in mid-November. There was something in my brain that told me that the best time to launch this series was going to be making sure that the Final Order Cut-off landed in the drumbeat to Halloween, and that the book would be on the stands in time for Black Friday and the whole Holiday Shopping season. What more could you want in your local comic shop this season?
I can’t say enough good things about the work of Joshua Hixson on the series. His art and colors capture the uneasy feeling of the book perfectly. We’ve been working on and talking about this book for such a long time, and I can’t wait for you all to see the way in which his work has leveled up to the next stratosphere. We’re up to something dark, and exciting in this book and I really can’t wait for it to finally come out.
We did the thing we did with W0RLDTR33 and announced the cover line-up but only showed off Josh’s incredible Cover A. The one I want to call out is the Die-Cut cover, which opens like a Christmas Card. You’ll have to get the comic to see what lives inside of that Snow Globe. But I think that’s going to be a favorite…
As always, we have a murderers row of incredible comic talent…