Somna wants to creep you out and turn you on, and you should let it

02.04.2024 - 20:59 / polygon.com

In Somna, one woman is burning, and another can’t sleep. She sees a demon when she shuts her eyes. He wants to do things for her, to her. It’s Puritan England, and they set women ablaze for thoughts like this. She ought to know — her husband is the one who lights the torch.

Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay, the legendary creative team behind the gorgeous erotic folk horror comic, bill Somna as “a bedtime story.” Like a lot of erotic work, this is a double entendre. Yes, its lead character, an Englishwoman named Ingrid, struggles with disordered sleeping. Much of the story takes place in bed as she slips into dreams and slowly begins to lose track of the borders between her waking life and her dreaming one. But beds are also for sex — her repressed desires come to frightening life in her unconscious mind, and possibly the real world, too.

“We went into Somna knowing that we wanted to tell an ambiguous story,” says Cloonan. “There’s no wrong way to read this comic. A lot of it’s gonna hopefully make people think about why they think it’s a certain way. If the demon that [Ingrid] is seeing isn’t real, why do you think that?”

“In the ’80s, there was a lot more of this kind of sexual horror stuff going on,” Lotay says. “There’s not as much of it now, but we’re bringing it back!”

The pair are referring to what many have noted is a uniquely sexless time in pop culture, leaving a void in the sort of explicitly sexual stories that explored messier aspects of the human experience. Deeply flawed characters responding poorly to internal and external desire, and how the world responds to them. In that regard, their work feels refreshing.

Somna is immediately beguiling, not just for the ways its lush art plays with reader perception, alternating between dreamy lust and folk-horror thrills. Cloonan and Lotay are working in a rich thematic space, exploring the ways repressive cultures and institutions harm everyone, even those who benefit from them. Initially inspired by a bout of sleep paralysis, the story gestated for 10 years before finding life as a miniseries for new comics publisher DSTLRY — an unusual and splashy entry in the burgeoning imprint’s line of debut titles.

“A book like Somna, I know it’s not for everyone. We didn’t go in thinking, Everyone’s gonna love this!” Cloonan laughs. “It’s definitely a self-indulgent book that we think some people might really enjoy.”

Somna is also arriving at the height of the romantasy boom in literature. Novels that take sex and romance just as seriously as their elaborate fantasy worlds are lighting up BookTok and Goodreads. Yet comics that cater to the direct market — your monthly periodicals famous for superhero yarns but full of other genre fare — have yet to make a big