While trying to ignore the numbers being just barely off, I dive further into the pule to find a series that has been sitting there for close to a year. But this is at least one that I had covered previously, and it’s just as appropriate now as we’re seeing dozens of Christmas in July sales before tariffs make all of our hobbies luxuries. But in the interim, we can still look at the end of James Tynion IV, Joshua Hixson, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s series The Deviant.

Michael has an idea for a comic. He’s just come off of writing superhero stories, but he wants something that’s closer to him—more personal. When he was a kid, he remembers hearing stories about the Deviant Killer—a man accused of dressing as Santa and killing the teenage boys dressed up as Christmas elves at the local department store. This killer was the first time Michael discovered that boys kissed other boys. When he meets the alleged killer in prison, Randall, he doesn’t know what kind of story he wants to write and talks around it without committing to any one direction. But then someone kills again and leaves the same kind of evidence, including Michael’s ID at the scene. Derek, Michael’s boyfriend, knows he couldn’t have done it, but everything points toward Michael in an all too convenient way.

Michael and Derek are true crime fans—it’s what they would bond over when they first began dating and is the common thread through much of the story. We see all angles of true crime fans throughout The Deviant as Tynion IV, Hixson, and Ostmane-Elhaou explore the kind of people who obsess and see some aspect of themselves in these cases. Michael sees himself in the Deviant Killer, even if they were both innocent, while others either obsess over the ephemera associated with the case or try to get as close as they can to the “killers” involved. There’s a spectrum of people around Randall, even if people believe he was the killer or don’t, they want to still be close enough to feel something from him. For Michael, it’s that familiarity, the connection of Michael growing up near the house Randall was arrested in and their homosexuality being the thread others use in an attempt to frame them. But then others just want to use that connection to a potential killer as a means of defining themselves despite the uncertainty of Randall even being the killer.

As much as we try to analyze someone and everything around them, we never can really know everything. We never do get the definitive answer about Randall—we can’t as it’s a closed case and Michael doesn’t want that angle for his own story. And that’s all we can really do with these kinds of sensationalized true crime stories—as much as we want to know, it’s impossible to ever get the full picture. We can obsess, but obsession doesn’t lead to the truth. 

Get excited. Get haunted.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.