"Be Not Afraid" is Coming

First things first: Today, Monday April 28th, is the final order cut-off for the first issue of Be Not Afraid, my new horror series with Lisandro Estherren. This is the last day you can pre-order it at comic stores, and pre-orders are used to determine things like "print run" and "media coverage" and "whether or not it was a mistake to hire Jude Doyle," so I would really appreciate you placing one with your local comic shop.

While you're deciding to do that, though, why not read this nice essay?

Every angel is terrible, wrote Rilke and (later) chart-topping artist The Weeknd. Stan Lee, somewhat less poetically, pitched the entire Galactus arc of Fantastic Four with four words: Have them fight God. I’m not claiming either of those phrases as a direct inspiration for Be Not Afraid, the new horror series I'm launching with artist Lisandro Estherren. But they seem like a good place to start. 

I first became frightened of angels when reading about the Elizabethan courtier-slash-astrologer-slash-diplomat-slash-probably-very-unwell-person, John Dee. Together with his medium, Edward Kelley, Dee claimed to have developed a means of communicating with angels, along with a language, “Enochian," that contained their power. It was a two-way street, though: In return for gifting him with this knowledge, the angels wanted Dee to help them end the world. 

The mythos is immensely creepy on its own — in one profoundly unsettling detail, their angelic guide, Madimi, first presents herself as a little girl and slowly grows over the course of the sessions into a superhumanly tall, naked woman covered in blood — but its afterlife was even stranger. Over and over, people who tried to replicate Dee’s work wound up going theatrically insane or dying in horrible ways. Angels, it turned out, were something like nuclear power — immensely potent, and capable of doing anything the summoner commanded, but only because they were vast primal forces that would ruin, corrupt, or kill any mortal who handled them directly.  

We are normally protected from angels, because they lack free will; they serve God, and act as extensions of Him. But we are not protected from God, or from ourselves, thanks to the free will He gave us. You can talk to the angels, and they will obey you, but they will also destroy you. You can walk right on up to a nuclear reactor and stick your dick in it — God will not stop you — but a price must be paid. 

I wanted to tell a story about angelic power escaping containment; about a divine Chernobyl. In Christian mythology, the being that most embodies this threat is the Nephilim, half-divine creatures born after angels raped and impregnated human women. 

Nephilim are angels made from atrocity; divine power, poured into corruptible human flesh. You can find them (not coincidentally) in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which tells us they were “giants,” much like the ever-growing Madimi, “who consumed  all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood,” until “the whole earth [is] filled with blood and unrighteousness.” Heaven is flooded with the souls of the recently and violently dead, weeping from all they have seen. 

Angels are terrible. The Weeknd and/or Rainer Marie Rilke weren’t lying to you. But nephilim are the worst, because they are half human, and human beings are terrible, too. 

At this point, launching a comic, it’s tradition for me to tell you what my inspirations were. That’s harder, this time, because I had fewer models; I was chasing a weird vibe that existed inside my head. There were movies that inspired me — you can find a whole Letterboxd list of them here — but I was also (for example) trying to realize my lifelong dream of finding a story that scared me in the precise manner of “Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen,” a PJ Harvey song that I have always found terrifying for inexplicable reasons. I was reading Wisconsin Death Trip and Cormac McCarthy — the Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian, mostly — but also Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. 

“Southern Gothic” is the typical genre marker, but I didn’t want Southern, necessarily — I was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but haven’t lived there since I was three, so I had no point of reference. I wanted corn-fed Americana that felt bleak and oppressive and horrific, the same way The Wicker Man or Witchfinder General turned Merry Olde England into an existential nightmare. I wanted an Andrew Wyeth painting of Hell. But there’s one story that hangs over Be Not Afraid more than any other: This story, like a significant proportion of all horror stories in American pop culture, is an attempt to process Ed Gein. 

I researched Gein for my 2019 book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. The basics of the case — that he dug up women’s corpses; that he collected their body parts as trophies, or sometimes wore pieces of their skin; that he shot and killed least two women, both of whom looked like his dead mother; that he may have eaten parts of them — are seeded throughout pop culture. The bit of Gein's story that stuck with me, though, was less sensational: His mother, Augusta Gein, was a famously (some say “fanatically”) devout Christian, and Ed Gein was an atheist. His reasoning was simple. After seeing his mother go through a long, painful, terminal illness, he didn’t believe that a just God would permit that kind of suffering.

It was such a quiet little detail, and it made me uncomfortably aware of Gein's humanity, in ways I hadn't been before. Nobody, no matter who they are, likes to watch their mother suffer. Ed Gein, the embodiment of American evil, started out as a person asking the same question as the rest of us: Why do bad things happen? 

If we live in a just universe governed by a loving God, why does that universe have Ed Gein in it? Why does it have Chernobyl? Why cancer? If angels are embodiments of God’s will, then why were they out there raping people to begin with? If the child of a woman and an angel will destroy the earth and fill it with blood and horror, then why does God allow that child to be born? 

These are questions that have haunted me for a long time. I was raised very Catholic, and my particular experience of Catholicism was odd, in that it involved Pentecostalism, which is normally a Protestant thing; it’s the weird, ecstatic, Dionysian variety of Christianity that prizes direct contact with God and letting the Holy Spirit enter and work through you. Laying on of hands, speaking in tongues, taking up serpents (though my church never did that last part, because it can kill you and is therefore illegal in most places); if angels are nuclear, then Pentecostals worship by picking up plutonium rods with their bare hands. 

My own parish eventually kicked the Pentecostal Catholics out for being heretics. (If you want to read more, the writer R/B Mertz has a memoir about them.) I left the church in my early teens, by which time my nascent queerness and feminism were making it obvious that I was not the kind of person God wanted hanging around. I never did lose the desire to touch God, and I am not an atheist; these days, I mostly study and (try to) practice Buddhism, but I still tend to slip instinctively into the language of faith when I talk about the Christian God. You can’t believe in something that deeply, for that long, starting almost from the moment that you can talk, and then leave it behind you. 

You can’t stop believing in that God — but you can reject it, or believe it has rejected you, and I did. To be told that you are fundamentally not what God wants — because you’re trans, because you’re queer, because you’re feminine or assigned female; because you ask too many questions, because you want too much, because you won’t conform; because you’re the child of an angel and a human woman and your very existence is an abomination that makes the world unclean — causes profound anger. Either God’s justice is worthless, or you are. I took turns believing both things, and both of them hurt. 

I am not trying to Richard Dawkins my way through life here, or tell anyone what they have to believe; I think shitting on people for trying to find meaning is cruel. But it is also not surprising, or new, to say that institutional Christianity has been used to suppress certain classes and (especially) genders of people, or to make them feel like shit about themselves. And this history did start to bleed out of me when I was writing Be Not Afraid, which is about a family and a town full of people who have been failed by God, and who all have different ideas of why God permits the suffering they've been through. 

Some of them believe that God is cruel and tyrannical, someone who sets up rules so he can punish people for breaking them; some of them believe in a God of mercy, who loves everything, including that which we call evil; some believe in a God that is simply the Dharma, the Plan, the Way Things Are, which can neither be reasoned with nor asked to take a side. Some want to understand God, some want to obey God, some want God to love them or do them favors, and some (pace Stan Lee) just want to fight. 

I did not intend for this to be a theological treatise. Mostly, what I wanted was to be scary: Maw, my first comic, had been intentionally hard and dark and bleak and disturbing, just to prove that I could do it, and The Neighbors had been a retreat to a softer and more human tone. I felt ready to write something deeply upsetting again, and this was the story that upset me most. 

Still: I woke up some time after the final script was accepted and realized I think I wrote a comic to figure out what God is. I mean: It’s also a comic about a creepy baby that can give people cancer by looking at them, and I realize that I have told you almost nothing about the cancer baby, or the plot itself. I'll have to talk about the plot a lot, in the coming months, so before that starts, I wanted you to know where the story began. But suffice it to say that my creepy cancer baby helped me work through some very long-held and troubling questions about the universe. I was proud that I had managed to go deeper than I thought I could, and hopeful that it might matter to someone else who had the same questions. I looked upon it, and it was good. Sort of. I hope. Come and see. 

Be Not Afraid will be on comic stands June 4. FOC is (have I mentioned?) Monday, April 28. While you're pre-ordering it, you can also reserve a copy of this year's DC Pride.