The Deep Ones

by Sean T. Collins & Julia Gfrörer

Julia and I made a comic about sea monsters, their meaning, and their menace. You can read it at The Nib and buy it in “Deep Trouble,” the latest issue of Symbolia Magazine.

You can also follow the inspiration blog we made for the comic, the-deep-ones.

I’m going to be at SPX, the Small Press Expo, in Bethesda, Maryland this weekend. I look like the person in the photo up top. I’m going to have work in the new Study Group Magazine #3D, which will debut at the show; I wrote a brand-new four-page comic about werewolves and secrets called “Hiders” that was drawn by Julia Gfrörer. Julia will also be selling our comic In Pace Requiescat, a pornographic extrapolation from “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe; I should have copies of Flash Forward, the horror comic Jonny Negron and I made about seeing and being seen, as well. I suspect you’ll find me mostly at Julia’s table, W34B. We look like the people in the photo at the bottom. SPX is a terrific show, and if you’re anywhere in the DC/Baltimore area and have any interest in alternative comics at all it’s well worth the trip. I would love to see you there!

Come see me at CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (the “k” is silent, and invisible), this weekend! I’ll sporadically be at table 68A with Julia Gfrörer, hawking our Edgar Allan Poe porn comic In Pace Requiescat and potentially Flash Forward by me and Jonny Negron too, and I look like this.

What inspired you to make this Poe Porn (lol)?

Sean: Julia and I have a lot in common, and one of those things happened to be a fascination with this particular Poe story, which we’d both read at an impressionable age.

Julia: I felt like Sean’s script was such an effective interpolation of the original story because in a sense it wasn’t radical at all, its constituent elements are entirely native to the source material. There are hints of regret, of reluctance, almost tenderness, supporting the maniacal sadism. The meticulousness with which Montresor inflicts the final act of cruelty on his friend already carries an erotic undertone–maybe not all readers experience that, but Sean and I didn’t invent it.

Sean: In “The Cask of Amontillado” I recognized a link between the genres of horror and pornography. Both frequently rely on a sense of certainty for their visceral emotional impact: When you begin to read or watch a horror story, you know that a terrible thing will happen, and frequently so does the character to whom it’s going to happen. In pornography, as in sex generally, you know that when your partner begins touching you, you have entered into a process that will end with you briefly losing control of your own body, unable to think of anything but the pleasure your partner is effectively forcing you to experience at the expense of everything else. In both cases that certainty is magnetic to minds trapped in our unforgivingly inconstant and unpredictable world. Dread and eroticism are two sides of the same coin neither of us can stop flipping in the art we make or consume.

Julia: Right, I rarely respond to a sex scene that doesn’t have some foreboding attached to it. The sense that the world has stopped and what’s happening right now is the only thing that matters or exists is romantic, but it also feels like something on the verge of panic.

Sean: “The Cask of Amontillado” and Montresor’s revenge scheme both depend on that certainty — on Montresor letting Fortunato know exactly what’s happening to him, and exactly what will continue to happen to him until he dies. There just came a day when I wondered what would happen if Montresor’s mental circuit overloaded and that horrific mastery over another human being became erotic mastery over the same person. This was the result.

We hope to do more Poe-nography together, actually. We’ve been talking about “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Julia: “The Pit and the Pendulum” seemed a little on the nose.

—Glory Hole In One: A NSFW Comic Book Review & Interview | Slutist

The marvelous writer/musician/dominatrix Hether Fortune interviewed me and Julia Gfrörer about In Pace Requiescat, our pornographic adaptation of/extrapolation from “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe, for Slutist.You can buy the comic here.