Dead Sky Publishing To Collect ‘Deprog’ This Fall
by Brendan M. Allen
On March 20, Dead Sky Publishing launched the first issue (of four) of Deprog. The new comics series from co-creators Tina Horn and Lisa Sterle, who join forces with colorist Gab Contreras and cover artist Dani, brings you a tale that evokes John Constantine and Jessica Jones, with a kinky Midsommar twist.
Dead Sky Publishing is excited to bring this series to life. “Comics has long been a male-dominated industry,” said co-publisher Steve Wands. “The industry needs women. It needs new voices. New points of view. We want to be a publisher that can affect positive change and attract new readers to not just Dead Sky, but to comics and it’s important that we do so in a meaningful way and not tokenizing people.”
And as to why they wanted to work with writer Tina Horn, Wands continued, “Her work is unapologetic, smart, and she writes like no one else in comics right now. She doesn’t write characters, she writes people, and then she puts them through hell.”
Meet Tate Debs, a hardboiled, hard-drinking, leather-loving dyke detective with an office in the back of Los Angeles’s last video store. Tate specializes in rescuing and deprogramming people from abusive groups with extreme beliefs – like the one Tate herself escaped, that believed in inter-dimensional travel and taboo ritual sex. When a femme named Vera, who may just be fatale, hires Tate to infiltrate a group of mystical hippies out in the desert, she must decide if Vera’s charms are worth being re-traumatized. Soon, Tate must face her past out of devotion to the femme she may be falling for, and a single-minded drive to avenge her family.
“As a butch-leaning queer woman,” said Horn. “I’ve always seen myself in fast-talking, hard-boiled detectives in fiction from Philip Marlowe to John Constantine. I hope readers are ready for a new queer anti-hero to root for even as they question some of her life choices!”
Of her collaborators, Horn continued, “Lisa, Gab, and Dani are the perfect art team for this book: they all know how to make seduction creepy and creepiness seductive.”
“Any opportunity I get to illustrate queer characters is inspiring and exciting to me, and the way in which Tina cleverly transforms noir tropes of the troubled, alcoholic detective, and the damsel in distress immediately pulled me into this story,” added Sterle. “Dusty Californian cults, fetish and taboos, mystery and intrigue, sex and seduction, trauma and healing—this is a genre comic that I think pushes on the boundaries of that genre in really unique ways. Also, getting a chance to illustrate some truly steamy scenes was a bonus for sure!”
All four issues of the series will be available at in-store and online retailers in a quality collected edition, which publishes September 3, 2024.
