Molly Knox Ostertag has been wanting to tell a more mature story for a long time now. When I first spoke with her about The Deep Dark after it began life as Substack comic 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Darkest Night, the cartoonist was using it as an opportunity to broaden their horizons, and to m🍷ove away from the realms of young adult fiction and children’s animation to explore her messier side.

What I didn’t expect was for this graphic novel that explores trauma, bloodshed, and LGBTQ identity to be published by Scholastic of all places. But after success with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Girl From The Sea and a greater proliferation of diverse queer stories following the popularity of Alice Oseman’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Heartstopper, the publisher decided to take a chance on this emotionally intense and intimate tale. One of familial expectatiౠons, falling in love, and learning to let go of entrenched generational hardship.

There Is A Beast Hiding Within Us All

Magdalena Hererra isn’t your typical heroine. She’s a butch woman with shorter hair, a masculine build. Put simply: she goes against all the feminine traits you’d expect from a lead character in stories🍸 like this, which are so often eager to ride the lines behind strong queer representation and heteronormative ideals. She works at a local diner and lives with her elderly grandmother, all while maintaining a fractured relationship with her parents and feeding a deep, dark secret in her basement. The expectation of keeping this threat at bay is slowly draining life away from Mags, until childhood friend 𒐪Nessa re-enters her world and changes everything.

We 💖spoke with Molly Ostertag and ND Stevenson about the future🦂 of queer stories and their own work back at Thought Bubble 2023.

Nessa has spent her early adulthood living in Los Angeles, going through her transition, and leaving behind a dusty hometown with little prospects. And yet Mags remains, and it doesn’t take much to pull her out of her shell. They attend parties, exchange memories in the midst of the night, and teeter on the precipice of something more romantic, but Mags pulls themself away each and every time. She is scared of getting closer, or learning of what she really𒁏 wants and standing up to generational trauma so deeply embedded in her existence that it feels impenetr🌠able.

Their entire life, Mags has been told to fit inside a box, used and treated as a tool so much that the only satisfaction they can feel is providing for other people, regardless of their own happiness. From her perspective, there is no way to be truly happy without ruining everything. It mirrors experiences many people will go through, shackled to familial duties and routines so ingrained that trying to shift or change ✱feels impossible. In life, it is okay for one to be selfish in order to grow, to leave behind fragments of who you once were if you’re not only going to grow, but learn to value what it means to be alive.

Mags is a caregiver for her grandmother, an object of sexual desire for a local girl that cheats on her boyfriend, and so much more. Nessa is the first person iꦚn years who has treated her with a modicum of agency. No longer an object to be nursed into an early grave.

It hits awfully close to home, and you can see the residual trauma Mags goes through in the encroaching blotches of black in certain panels that not only represent Mag’s family curse, but the fear of accepting that it’s okay to have friends, ask for help, and realise that perhaps y🐷our upbringing was unfairly thrust in certain directions that had lasting impact. You can love and cherish and take care of your family, but it goes both ways, and The Deep Dark is never afraid to explore that transaction through its supernatural love story.

Sometimes It’s Okay To Be Selfish In Order To Grow

Moments of colour will intersperse♏ occasionally, either during moments of bloodshed or brief windows into a past where life once felt more optimistic. It also appears as Mags and Nessa ෴grow closer and come to realise that a distant childhood friendship can blossom into a more beautiful thing, but only if they let it, and sometimes that’s the hardest part.

There’s plenty to admire in how Mag’s brash exterior hides a sensitive soul, one that has been told to hide away again and again in service of protecting itself. It takes a feminine and confident foil like Nessa who is willing to nestle into Mag’s life and change things for the better, but only if her friend is ready. Ostertag’s work has always explored themes like this, but The Deep Dark is especially poignant in how it picks apart the most sensitive parts of its ca𓆉st and lays them bare.

It also builds on the themes o෴f , a shorter, yet heartfelt, personal comic from Ostertag about the struggle of accepting identity and slowly leaving parts🤪 of your past self behind, even if society comes to view you as a dangerous and bloodthirsty beast in the process.

The pain of leaving who you once were in the dust is way less painful than living in the shadoꦜw of something you’ve always wanted to be. Pain is a catalyst to growth, and coming to recognize what you’ve been suppressing and how to challenge that part of who you are per෴meates through much of Ostertag’s work, and The Deep Dark takes it so much further.

The Deep Dark launches today in Paperback, Hardcover, and Digital.