Deprog #1-2

Note: This review covers the first two issues of Deprog. A trade paperback collecting the first four issues is also available now.

Whether or not the idea of a publisher having a sensibility is “real,” making a claim for one is an expression of context; a way to sort history, draw lines, and avoid the fracas of grab-bag motif matching. There have been many comics about sex or ones in which explicit references to sex appear on the page, and they have come from the majority of name-brand publishers and presumably even more forgotten houses. To some degree this is good; normalization of a normal thing may be the ideal function of culture. To some degree it is critically impractical.

In the case of Deprog, looking at its publisher provides some practical context and lacks a fair bit more. Dead Sky, whose “About” page provides no date of founding but whose X page has been active only since 2021, and was referred to as “brand new” by ComicBookYeti in 2022, publishes “work that is inherently dark.” This is accurate to the book, and acceptable as an umbrella claim — it situates Deprog within a curated field and stakes a claim for it as a part of the ongoing history of provocative misery entertainment. Their product tags include words like “Haunted,” “Splatter Western,” “Dark Sci-Fi” and “Aliens.”

I cannot object to this, and see the web of intrigue that this classification will prompt in the right audience, but it is a contextualization that is less compelling than I might have hoped for for myself. Deprog is about a lesbian cult-smasher detective getting too involved with a client while she’s also too involved in the resurgence of her own history, and both of these strands are processed on the page through queer sex and kink play. I am interested in the historic scope of sex comics, and I find myself wishing that this book bore the stamp of Kitchen Sink.

Kitchen Sink Press is a long-defunct business that managed thirty years of comics publishing, running on the counter-culture principles that comics should be fascinating and that fucking is something people do, so why not put it on the page. They published books without primary sexual content and they also published Crumb. They put out Bizarre Sex. They published some of Trina Robbins’ dirty books. They published the first five issues of Gay Comix. They published Omaha the Cat Dancer, and Melody, The True Story of a Nude Dancer. They published covers where enormous genitals reached into and out of the sky.

Not every piece of Kitchen Sink output was serious or agreeable or even always fascinating, and that is where brand-as-context comes in: while they gave the world a lot of hideous heterosexual provocation from socially abrasive men they also built a ground floor of balance. This is a necessary approach to offering revolting items, and it’s something lost in Robert Crumb’s iconic status. He is simply too famous to be first encountered in any context but “the whole wide world,” and therefore looms threateningly as an influential, masculine, opinionated authority on what sex comics “are” and what, therefore, sex between men and women “is.” Out of context, his aesthetic erects a tent called Sex that emits a very particular intensity. Do you enter? One may or may not resent the path between the flaps. Within a chosen context — considered as one of many Kitchen Sink sex comics creators, (though he published elsewhere first, during, and afterwards widely) — he’s just a guy who likes some particular things. That is his kind of sex, and that’s all.

Kitchen Sink losing the battle with economy twenty-five years ago makes it impossible for this particular contextualization to continue. There are no more “Kitchen Sink sex comics.” There is no current connection to that life-giving context, for the old or for the new. The line is broken.

Of course there are more sex comics — there’s one from every publisher, different kinds of sex and different kinds of protagonists having it. We’ve even seen Batman’s hog. I could pull titles from the ether and say, "Look! There’s a line of congruency between there, and here!" But the critical mind cringes from the diffuse and desperate pattern matching in fear of becoming a TV Tropes lunatic. Too much opportunity becomes both overstimulating (unpleasant) and unconvincing (disheartening).

Let’s do it anyway! The Invisibles (Vertigo for DC) overlapped with Kitchen Sink’s dying years. Elizabether Watasin’s Charm School at Slave Labor Graphics took a lighthearted approach to life-affecting sexuality that echoed Melody. Maria Llovet has bounced between BOOM!, Black Mask, Image, and more for years now. You can get translated manga galore with tits and lips and blank spaces where you-know-what is missing from print publishers with anglophone industry presence, as well as who-what-who machine translations from the digital arms of Japanese companies barely interested in international markets. Independent cartoonists are telling the warm genital truth every day of the week.

And you can get Deprog from Dead Sky, where a blonde and bodacious nonbinary lesbian dominatrix watches the protagonist get suspended from hooks in her flesh and verbally degraded (for fun), and then they finger-fuck stark naked on the sex club couch.

I think that it’s very good that we can get all these comics. I think it’s essential that the industry at scale is still paving that yellow brick motorway of perspective/identity balance, making sure everyone can look at a comic pamphlet and see the range of what they recognize sex as, see what other people think it is too, in comics that can’t exist without someone getting crammed, slammed or admitting what they want. It’s not that hard to create a context out of comics that shores you up and frees you right now. I don’t know if “the dialogue” or “the discourse” is reflecting that. I don’t know if the subconscious mores of the masses allows for it. I don’t know that it’s easy to notice or perceive. I don’t know that it’s not an obstructed view for many, by real things that are really in the way or just by the lack of a plain map. I think that if Deprog was a Kitchen Sink book it would all be easier to see, and it would be easier to talk about. Every tree needs a trunk. But it’s not, and it can’t be, so we’ll just have to do our best anyway.

Writer Tina Horn is dedicated to promoting sex acceptance and investigating the philosophy of therapeutic kink, and that she chooses to use comics among her many avenues for this is good, right, and proper. The history is there. If it feels rare or shocking to encounter books like this then you have found the keys to the kingdom and there are many more to help you find your equilibrium. In Deprog, characters talk openly about their needs, sexual or physical or psychological, and how they relate those to their backgrounds and their unwanted humiliations, and they do not engage with shame except by choice (and then it’s referred to as playing with power). Masochism is introduced in the extreme in early pages and then pulled back to be integrated into the protagonist’s matter-of-fact self-description, which is effective as a shock-absorber. Matter-of-factness dominates, really; people express that they want to have sex and then have it straight away. The main character Tate talks up loving “that problematic shit” but at two issues in this is a non-problematic comic unless the reader objects to notions and visible ideas rather than effective execution. People have sex, and perform scenes of consensual injury, but we are shown these in a similar way to how they are experienced if one walks in on people doing things — there they are, doing something you can say you saw, after you leave — rather than being investigative or entwining. You haven’t caught anyone in any act. You’ve been informed that people do this, like it, and are allowed to.

This is a way to welcome serious thought and the trepidatious repressed: "It’s not gratuitous, it’s just things that people do.”

Artist Lisa Sterle’s career in girl, queer and glamour-centric comics is on a trajectory here. The main characters are pretty, tousled and a little fat, which is an appealing combination and another necessary balancing ground. Gab Contreras’ coloring is chosen by scenario and fits the art well, but is a little dark throughout in pursuit of a noir-ish theme. I am not a fan of filling empty panel backgrounds with gradient rather than flat color, especially when the choice between the two is inconsistent — the effect of the mixture is of making the page feel even less full, a sort of visible lorem ipsum attitude towards space that makes me wonder if everyone was getting paid enough. There is something off in the page-by-page pacing, which I think is down to interaction of script and layouts rather than an absolute deficit in one of them. Narratively, there is no apparent b-plot; we follow one character through a fairly linear series of inter-expository events, building tension by accessorizing this progression with mysterious enemies. This works well in film — The Hitcher, featuring a problematic 1980s queer-coded villain, is a good example— but is a little hard on the expectant reader when reading an issue-by-issue comic series. It tends to make a story feel shorter.

Sterle is an adept illustrator of people and their effectively stylized outfits, but does have directorial weaknesses. The pages are nice to look at, but framing doesn’t always add value past the literal and sometimes prioritizes “showing someone leave” over the gist or meaning of the panel or moment. Even beats that have evident emotional intention are executed at some remove, on pages that don’t need the space for anything else, and though her facial and bodily anatomy is fairly stylized, their expressions never are. She’s undramatic with shadow and uses it sparingly, and divides and sizes her panels very evenly. The effect is that the narrative presents itself non-confrontationally — this too might be a benefit for those not looking for acid burns, but out to participate in a thought experiment about verboten intimacies. Deprog doesn’t look any different from Sterle’s teen book Squad, for example, which creates a nice path of progression — a context — for her dedicated readers.

Having noted three listed editors, I do feel that choices of emphasis in the dialogue should not be strangely made once or twice an issue. Somebody should catch this. For example, “Isn’t this a conflict of interest?” / “Depends on what we’re both interested in” — the “interest” is both the repeated word and the pivot point of the exchange, so the emphasis should be on “in,” as that is where the meaning of the pivot word is changed. In spoken dialogue, emphasis may appear to fall on “interested” here, as the speaker makes a point of using the same word differently meant, but would still be present during “in” and would be accompanied by the delivery equivalent of what a tilde ~ provides in type. Quotation marks around “interested” may do the same job. The “in” should still be bolded. In the same issue, the phrase “perpetuating harmful stereotypes” is bolded for only the first two words. That’s unnatural. The lettering is standard; SFX do not match panel texture. They seem to be an in-house lettering studio, or at least consistently employed by Dead Sky and no-one else, belonging to Steve Wands (a veteran letterer, one of the three listed editors of this book, and Co-Publisher at Dead Sky upon launch). This lays more of a claim on Deprog as “a Dead Sky book,” rejecting my applied context, and returning it to its own.

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