DEAD SKY PUBLISHING ANNOUNCES NEW COMICS SERIES FROM CO-CREATORS TINA HORN AND LISA STERLE

Pre-orders are open until January 24 for Issue #1 of DEPROG, by writer Tina Horn and artist Lisa Sterle, with colorist Gab Contreras and cover artist DANI

On March 20, Dead Sky Publishing will launch the first issue (of four) of DEPROG, the new comics series from co-creators TINA HORN (SfSx) and LISA STERLE (Witchblood), who join forces with colorist GAB CONTRERAS (Trve Kvlt) and cover artist DANI (Carmen Maria Machado’s The Low Low Woods)-to bring you a tale that evokes John Constantine meets 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.

Said Tina Horn of the new series, “As a butch-leaning queer woman, 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 artist Lisa 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!”

Pre-orders, which will determine the size of the print run, are being accepted until Wednesday, January 24. Readers are encouraged to visit their preferred comics shop to preorder and/or to request their favorite shop to bring it to their shelves. Readers can find a nearby comics shop using this locator: https://www.comicshoplocator.com/

Here are the Diamond ID numbers for the Issue #1; the cost is $4.99 each:

1A: JAN241553

1B: JAN241554

1C: JAN241555

1D: JAN241556

DEPROG creator bios:

TINA HORN (Writer/Co-Creator)

Tina Horn is a writer, educatrix, and media-maker. Her book of fetish cultural criticism based on her long-running indie podcast Why Are People Into That?! will be out in 2024 from Hachette. Tina is the creator/writer of the sci-fi sex-rebel comic book series Safe Sex (Image) and the host/cowriter of the phone sex podcast Operator (Wondery). Her reporting on sexual subcultures has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere; she is the author of two nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including the queer horror collection Theater of Terror and We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival which she also co-edited. Tina has lectured on adult entertainment politics and queer BDSM identities at universities and community centers all over North America, and works as an on-set consultant for theater, film, and television including the dominatrix scenes of Pose. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, winner of two Feminist Porn Awards, an AVN-nominated director, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. Originally from Northern California, Tina spent a decade in NYC before re-settling in Los Angeles.

LISA STERLE (Artist/Co-Creator)

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. She has worked with HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, DC, IDW, Image, BOOM! Studios, and many others.

GAB CONTRERAS (Colorist)

Gab Contreras is a comic book colorist, illustrator, and graphic designer from Lima, Peru. Her last works as a colorist include “WITCHBLOOD” (Vault Comics), “DIRTBAG RAPTURE” (ONI Press), “TRVE KVLT” (IDW), “THE DEADLIEST BOUQUET” (Image Comics), and “MEZO: BATTLE AT COBÁN ROCK” (AWBW). She has also worked on anthologies such as “HELP: THE HERO INITIATIVE ANTHOLOGY”, “2000 AD SCI-FI SPECIAL 2018”, “DEAD BEATS”, “ALL WE EVER WANTED”, “MAYBE SOMEDAY”, “EMBODIED”, “EVERYTHING IS GOING WRONG” and “JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS – 40×40: Bad Reputation/I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”.

DANI (Cover Artist)

DaNi was born in Athens, Greece in 1992 and studied sculpture in Athens School of Fine Arts. She began to produce a self-published series called Tales from the Strips that won the Reader’s Choice Award at the Greek Comics Awards in 2015, before working on some 2000 AD strips including Fiends of the Eastern Front and Judge Anderson and on Rebellion’s Scream! & Misty and Tammy & Jinty specials. Soon she was on the radar of the US industry, picking up work from IDW on Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. More recently she has worked on the DC VERTIGO titles Sandman-The Dreaming, and is the co-creator of The Low, Low Woods for DC HILL HOUSE COMICS and Image comics series Coffin Bound.

Dead Sky Publishing, along with its Death’s Head Press imprint, publishes work that is inherently dark across a spectrum of genres and formats, in both fiction and non-fiction, from comic books to novels, from short story collections and anthologies to memoirs, and from art and photography books to graphic novels. Their books are distributed by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) and their comics are distributed by Diamond. You can visit them online at deadskypublishing.com.

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Al Mega

I'm Al Mega the CEO of Comic Crusaders, CEO of the Undercover Capes Podcast Network, CEO of Geekery Magazine & Owner of Splintered Press (coming soon). I'm a fan of comics, cartoons and old school video games. Make sure to check out our podcasts/vidcasts and more!