DEPROG – Trying To Alter Your Perspective
From Dead Sky Publishing, Deprog is a neo-noir thriller of sex, cults and conspiracy.
CAUTION: DEPROG IS FOR MATURE READERS, CONTAINING THEMES OF ABUSE, CANNABILISM, GRAPHIC SEX, AND NUDITY.
Tate Debs is a classic hard-boiled detective. Hard-drinking, leather-clad, and easily swayed by seductive femme fatales. Especially when they ask for help that is specifically matches here skill set. Having escaped herself from a cult believing in inter-dimensional travel and taboo ritual sex, Tate specialises in deprogramming people who have escaped abusive groups. When the gorgeous and mysterious Vera asks her to infiltrate a group of desert-dwelling, mystical hippies, Tate has to consider if she’s worth the risk of facing her past trauma, on top of whatever this group has in store.
Co-creators, Tina Horn and Lisa Sterle, have drawn on their past experience with various alternative, LGBTQ and sex-positive projects to bring together this mysterious project that has a lot to live up to.
The writer Tina Horn is the author of a number of non-fiction books and has published a number of sex subculture articles for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere.
The artist Lisa Sterle is the illustrator-creator of the iconic, bestselling Modern Witch Tarot deck, which has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue Italia and Cosmopolitan. She is also the co-creator and artist of the comics Witchblood, Squad, Long Lost, and Submerged.
Now they are lending both of their talents into a classic genre while bringing together their world-view specialties and experiences to mix up the formula. Initial impressions from issue one are good, not that it goes much beyond shock and titillation to grab your attention. The characters do feel fairly real and well-rounded, and it does give the impression that the creators have done some research into cults, psychiatry and deprogramming techniques, and BDSM practices.
This is definitely a much better and mature field of representation than you normally see for the LGBTQ demographic (as they tend to be tedious or overly flamboyant coming-of-age dramas, aimed at teens or young adults), “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.”
Deprog is on sale on March 20, 2024, but you can pre-order it now.
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