Comics pal and frequent collaborator James Tynion IV recently sent over an advance PDF of his upcoming horror comic The Deviant, created with artist Joshua Hixson and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Since, I’ve come to realise, this blog can be whatever I want it to be, I thought I’d use this place to shill what I think is an excellent comic.
James talks about The Deviant in more detail in his newsletter, but in short, it’s a Christmas-themed serial killer story about an axe-murderer in a Santa Claus suit who goes around killing queer men.
In the newsletter, James talks about his first exposure to queerness in media and how he wanted to explore the darker uncomfortable feelings that are as much a part of coming of age as a queer person as the joy of finally getting to be who you are:
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.
As someone who came of age around the same time, and in a country where queerness was seen as disgusting or only worth laughing at, I can entirely relate to this. It was, after all, the internet that helped me figure out who I was – between the lines of fetishistic erotica posted on usenet in .txt files, radfem rejection of anything outside the gender binary, and twee fanfiction that seemed entirely unrelated to the physicality of being queer, somewhere was the germ of who I would become over the next 25 years.
I watched We’re All Going to the World’s Fair this weekend (and I’ll be writing more about it in the next weekly update), and I saw so much of myself in it – late nights spent bleary-eyed in front of a glowing screen, begging it to tell you who you are.
In short, The Deviant feels very real to me.
Something I’ve loved about James’s creator-owned work, particularly as he continues to hack a trail farther away from his superhero work, is how much he’s willing to use space to let a story breathe.
This isn’t the same as “decompression” – which is the idea of using scenes that occur in close to real-time rather than the densely captioned comics of yesteryears. This is the desire to let a reader find their way to the place where the story is happening, and to give them time to breathe once a scene is done. This sounds like allowing the reader comfort, but in the context of a horror story, it does the opposite – it lets the horror sink in.
There is an assuredness to how The Deviant unfolds. Each beat feels lived, intentional, and there’s a confidence to allowing the art to govern how the moment is taken in. It’s a very manga thing, and you can see James’s manga influences showing here, but processed through both Western comics, and the horror movies he’s mentioned.
Joshua Hixson’s art is new to me, but he’s a great collaborator for this kind of story. Hixson’s art is grounded without being gritty (funnily enough, I can draw a line from his style to Tyler Boss’s, who just happened to have designed this book), and the fact that he colours himself allows him to filter the storytelling through the colours rather than just the inks. For example, there is a very specific rhythm to how red is used in this issue – from the ominous bright red in the first scene to a grimier dark red in the flashback to the (REDACTED TO AVOID SPOILERS) – and the way in which this red plays with how and when Hixson deploys shadows in the book.
Aiding James and Hixson here is my friend Hass, who is, of course, a very able letterer, and I think his scratchy sfx fit beautifully with the tone of the book – looking as if they might as well have been gouged out of the page with a razorblade.
As you can tell, I’m quite enamoured with this book, and I’ll be waiting for the later issues, because apart from all the praise I’ve given it above, I damn well want to know what happens next.
If you’ve found yourself interested, you can read more about The Deviant, check out all the variant covers, and how to order your copy in James’s newsletter.