Writer Cy Dethan latest comic series, The Kindness of Killers, is currently being published by Markosia, featuring art by Markus Pattern. His recently released prose novel Bad Sector, a crime story with a rather unusual premise, is the focus of a new interview over on SciFi Pulse.
This intriguing story is set in the sentient city of Expectation, where an augmented executioner hunts the murderer of Everyday Carrie – The Woman Who Couldn’t Be Killed. Permanent Mark is going to solve this case if it kills him… again…
“Long story short, the human brain is a scary place and I like writing about it,” he says of the project, in conversation with Ian Cullen.
British writer Cy Dethan should need no introduction to longtime downthetubes readers. Already an award-winning freelance copywriter and editor, he first established himself within the comics industry back in 2006, shouldering his way into the field of comics in 2006 with the serialisation of his Starship Troopers: Extinction Protocol strip from Mongoose Publishing.
In 2007, Cy was picked to take over Markosia’s flagship ongoing series, Starship Troopers. Since then, he has continued writing novels, graphic novels (including the disturbing but brilliant Cancertown), one-shots and anthology stories for a variety of publishers, in genres ranging from paranormal espionage to samurai splatterpunk.
He’s also a contributor of short stories to many anthology publications, including The British Comics Showcase, Time Bomb Comics’ Bomb Scares and the Metal Made Flesh series by Subversive Comics. He is also heavily involved in the Unseen Shadows transmedia project, the brainchild of bestselling Amazon author Barry Nugent. Cy’s Unseen Shadows contributions include The Reverend: Wrath of God for Tales of the Fallen, The Immaculate Abortion of Dina Leigh for Tales of the Forgotten and The Reverend: Blood Cries Out, the project’s first full-length graphic novel.
Bad Sector is his first prose novel, a noir-inflected dystopian thriller of silicon and scar tissue hit the streets in 2025. You can read a free preview and order it on Amazon in the format of your choice. He continues to produce fiction in genres ranging from paranormal espionage to samurai splatterpunk.
Talking about the origins of Bad Sector with SciFi Pulse, Cy says the project began with a collection of disorganised ideas about a woman learning that an imprisoned mass murderer had taken the identity of a dead relative of hers.
“In building out the killer character for that, my research rabbit-hole sprouted a few unexpected side-tunnels and I found myself reading about split-brain syndrome and the alien hand phenomenon,” he reveals. “Essentially, there’s enough functional redundancy in the human brain that we’re all basically running two parallel copies of our own consciousness – at least potentially. When people suffer injuries to the tissue connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, it’s possible to end up with two distinct consciousnesses occupying the same skull.
“That’s the basic premise of Permanent Mark, Bad Sector’s central character(s). The rest of the world formed itself around that core concept, to the extent that the story no longer resembles in any meaningful way the original ideas that kicked it off. In their place is something a lot bigger and a lot nastier. An impossible political murder committed in a living city, and an ultra-violent investigation conducted by a man whose brain runs two concurrent, independent instances of his own consciousness.”
An intriguing premise, I’m sure you’ll agree, and Cy discusses the project further in the interview, along with his other recent comic projects, Powers: Fearful & Divine, a new take on Houdini and Frankenstein, published by Blue Fox Comics, Phantom Lung & the Garden of Dead Liars, which you describe as an espionage story featuring a psychic assassin from the Cold War era; and the “Splatterpunk” series, The Kindness of Killers, Issue Three just published by Markosia.
“Samurai splatterpunk, technically,” says Cy. “As a genre description, it only shows a fraction of the picture, but ‘supernatural time-travelling blood-magic samurai slaughterhouse punk action thriller” felt a bit unwieldy.
“The Kindness of Killers deals with an overeducated underachiever who inadvertently joins a cult-like pyramid scheme of contract killers when she tries to get rid of a set of blood-infused magic swords that have fallen into her hands. In extricating herself from the business, her life gets violently entangled with that of the swords’ former owner – a cursed samurai from four centuries earlier who has sworn to destroy the cult and their bloodless demon lord.
“It’s a book I’ve had a lot of fun with, and working with Markus Pattern on it has been amazing. He’s a fantastic artist with a blistering talent for violence and a real flair for characterisation.”
• Read the SciFi Pulse interview with Cy Dethan here
• Bad Sector by Cy Dethan is available here from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)
• Cy Dethan is online at cydethan.com
With thanks to Ian Cullen
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Books, British Comics, British Comics - Current British Publishers, British Comics - Graphic Novels, Comic Creator Interviews, Comics, Creating Comics, downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, Features, Other Worlds
Leave a Reply