Maybe there’s too much going on during the holidays. The gift wrapping, the shopping, the decorating. And to add an extra issue to the pile: the murders. In Wisconsin in 1973, there was a series of gruesome murders conducted by a man in a Santa suit. In 2023 in Chicago, they’ve begun again. James Tynion IV, Joshua Hixson, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou show us these murders in the first issue of their series The Deviant.

Michael is a writer from Milwaukee. He grew up not far from the house of Randal Olsen, the man known as the Deviant Killer. While growing up, Michael was still too young to have experienced the panic around the murders. But that doesn’t stop him from wanting to know more about them by interviewing Olsen, who was accused of wearing a Santa suit and killing so many young men fifty years prior. But maybe this man wasn’t who they thought. Fifty years later he still insists that he isn’t the one that committed the murders despite resigning himself to being in prison for the rest of his life because of it. At this point he’s accepted his scapegoat status, even if both him and Michael don’t know that the killings are about to begin again.

In The Deviant, Tynion, Hixson, and Otsmane-Elhaou firmly establish that link between horror and the queer audiences that have always gravitated toward the genre. Just the name of the series and the name “the Deviant Killer” already call to mind the terms used by lawmakers and WASPS across American history to label anyone suspected of being gay. Michael and Randal themselves are gay, with Michael recounting his own discovery of a man having sex with other men from the stories he heard about Randal, while Randal himself mentioning his first exposure to that kind of “deviancy” was hearing about Ed Gein. In horror, that idea of the deviant stretches back a century at this point as they were always the characters ostracized from the world for who they were—reinforced by the Hays code and the need for queer-coded villains to be “punished” at the end of a film. For a series like this, then, the subtext is the text itself.

The Deviant is, on the surface, a creepy slasher story told around Christmas time for that added layer of menace. But the more we dive into the first issue, we see more of what Tynion, Hixson, and Otsmane-Elhaou are looking to do with the start of this series. From the word choice to how Michael is written as finding something familiar in Randal after their interview, we can see the beginnings of an exploration that goes deep into this horror and what “deviant” can mean. 

Get excited. Get haunted.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.