Deicidium: Returned Review
- Writer
- Ram V
- Artists
- Evan Cagle, Anand RK
- Letters
- Aditya Bidikar
- Publisher
- Image Comics
- Released
- 11/11/2026
- Format
- Graphic novel · 96 pages
- Cover
- Alvaro Escobar
- Price
- $12.99
I’ve found myself frustrated by the way the comics direct market conducts its business for a while now. The way these comics are produced does not always fit with the stories these comics are telling. So many books that could’ve been better off if read in one go are left to extend their pacing in unnatural ways which take it all away, and on the flipside, books that would thrive if read sequentially and allowed to go on that way are cursed to suffer as they’re told in a format that doesn’t make sense.
All because the format is all the industry has known, it’s what its backbone is built on.
Deicidium’s existence feels like a way to challenge that conception. Can these comics be made in another way, can these stories be told in a way where they aren’t compromised by the format? Ram V, Evan Cagle, Anand RK, Aditiya Bidikar and Tom Muller, under the banner of Mirror Maker Studios, have set out to answer this question, teaming up with French publisher Morgen to publish Deicidum in extended, ~90 page long trade paperbacks, coming out with them at a steady pace, rather than be beholden to the 24-32 page monthly.
At its core, I find the production method to be fascinating. It was 6 and a half years ago now that the world was forced into quarantine during a global pandemic that there was some experimentation of how these comics are released in the form of various Substack deals, where people could pay creators directly every month to get access to their exclusive comic. It’s a format that has largely died out, with the exception of Three Worlds/Three Moons, which is its own can of worms (and also something Ram V contributed to very early on into its lifecycle).
I spoke to Ram about Deicidum, and the format choice in an interview that you can listen to at 12PM EST.
Going past the format, I found Deicidium to be extremely fascinating. To go back through how I’ve interfaced with V’s work across his career, a common thread seems to be looking at ideas about determinism, if we’re truly slaves to our fate or if we can break free of the cycles that we’re chained to. Deicidium, or at the very least, from what I can infer from its first volume, RETURNED, seems to be interested in these same questions, another piece of the puzzle.
Set in the far, far, future, where even though things are different, there’s similarities to a world of the past. Their lexicon (I was particularly moved by the people in Section C, Vandasthal (aka the Slums) using words we find in South Asian languages like ‘bhai’), the way Ram switches out letters from words of different languages to make new proper nouns (Vandasthal is similar to the Sanskrit word Vanasthali, meaning natural sanctuary), even the clothes Evan Cagle illustrates them in, but most importantly:
The conflicts. Religion being used as a way to control the masses, capitalism ruining nature, the oppression of people who want to be free. A struggle that continues to persist through time, even as old worlds are left behind.
Evan Cagle is already pulling off career defining work here. His first published work with Ram V was an issue of Catwoman, before he went on to illustrate the covers of V’s Detective Comics and work together on Dawnrunner and New Gods before heading to Deicidium. As a fan of both Dawnrunner and New Gods, there was a more special feeling to his Detective covers that he illustrated and coloured on his own, that were missing in those books. But that energy is back in Deicidium 1: Returned.
Illustrated in blacks, whites, and greys, we get an uncompromised Cagle, playing with inks, shadows and textures to beautifully absorb a reader into a brand new world. Every page layout is accounted for within the context of being viewed as part of a two page spread, with extremely confident storytelling to truly sell us on this world. Even now I think about that first two page spread, where the old Professor is staring off, looking at a statue that reminded of Atlas, where a person is kneeling as a city grows on their back.
What is fascinating within this though, is where colour is in fact used. I’ve found colour in comics to be an interesting discussion, where, like good lettering, it is often “unseen” or invisible. It either has to be bad or truly remarkable to stand out. However, due to the nature of the publishing process, everything is still in colour regardless, even as we sometimes get artists posting their black and white pages on social media, or even ashcans or the recent DC WIP issues, where we get an issue in black and white that may look stronger than it does with colours. So what happens when colour is used sparingly, used to really sell a moment? That’s the experiment Deicidium runs here, and it’s an experiment that pays off extremely effectively. From that first panel, to how it frames the ending of the issue, it is a delight.
I’d be remiss to mention the art of lettering and not mention Aditya Bidikar’s letters. Effortlessly gorgeous, but I found myself moved by the different bubbles and ways of displaying text he brings onto this to really make every word sing. Alongside this, Tom Muller’s designs really do bring it together. I cannot imagine a single other designer in comics who could quite bring this together the way he did.
Deicidium is a delight. In a decade of interesting comics publishing experiments, this seems to be one of the more interesting ones to have come out. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this story develops, and how they continue to play with the format in interesting ways.
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