In the icy forests of Sahull, a monster steals brides on their wedding nights.

The Arcana Imperii—a secret organization dedicated to hunting monsters and investigating magical anomalies—enlists two of its most powerful agents to put an end to the terror. Lalo and Oz have been at each other’s throats since the moment they first met, but the only thing that can match the intensity of their rivalry is the heat of their repressed desires for one another. Forced together on a dangerous mission where survival is uncertain, neither of them are prepared for the sparks and blood that will fly in the cold north.

So reads the Itch page for queer, erotic dark fantasy graphic novel The Vow (which is also available in print format). Illustrated by Julian Cormac and written by Arden Ripley, The Vow is a messy, sexy, dangerous tour de force and a triumph of independent comicking. Fans of BP Games might recognize the names of its creators: both Julian and Arden have contributed work to several of our projects, Julian as a UI artist and Arden as proofreader/editor. I’m blessed to count both of them among my dearest friends, and wanted to provide them with an opportunity to hold forth about their influences, creative process, and other thoughts about this tremendous undertaking. Please enjoy this EXCLUSIVE interview with these up-and-coming indie comic superstars!

Bigg: Let’s start with some quick getting-to-know you questions. Could you please tell me your names, what you did on The Vow, and your personal pick for sexiest monster of all time?

Arden: Dude we’re going to be here for hours that is an agonizing question.

Bigg: I feel like that response is already extremely revealing.

Julian: I’m Julian, I did the art for The Vow, and my personal sexiest monster of all time is probably William Birkin/G from Resident Evil 2… I think the way that you get to watch his humanity get broken down and digested/corrupted into a writhing mass of indiscriminate flesh is so insanely hot.

Arden: Arden Ripley, I wrote it, and if I had to pick one I think it would be the xenomorph from Alien. Or the thing from The Thing. I didn’t even let myself start thinking about video game ones because if I have access to the entire FromSoft boss oeuvre I won’t ever answer the question.

Bigg: The Vow’s print run was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in August 2024, released in digital format in December 2024, and finally released in physical format in May 2025. How has the reception been throughout these various stages?

Julian: It’s been really lovely overall! We had expected the digital release would get more momentum than it did (lower price point, doesn’t take up space on a shelf, no shipping fees) but, uh, turns out people really prefer a physical book! Now that it’s out in print it’s been a lot easier to get eyes on it, which helps a lot. I end up seriously questioning everything about my art right before hitting send on a project, so the fact we have gotten literally no unkind words about The Vow is an incredible ego boost. What’s made me happiest is the feeling we’ve made something that has, in its own small corner of the world, majorly gotten its hooks into someone. Recently while tabling, I met a college student who told me that they were so obsessed with The Vow that they and all of their roommates had their own copy, and I think that was when I knew I’d already gotten where I most wanted to be.

Arden: The reception has been wonderful. We hindered our own reach a bit because we staggered the digital and physical releases of the book; we didn’t really count on how many people would prefer to read the comic in physical form. Even with that misstep, though, the feedback from readers has been amazing. It’s energized me creatively and done so much to restore my confidence in my writing. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who’s given it a chance.

Bigg: I understand that Oz and Lalo, The Vow’s main characters, pre-date the comic. What were they originally from, and how did they make the journey from there to the graphic novel bigtime? Was their relationship always as acrimonious as it is at the start of the story?

Arden: I’ve been a Dragon Age fan since the release of Origins in 2009. When Julian moved in with me, I was really excited to make them play through Inquisition so they could understand what the fuck I was always talking about. Oz was initially my Inquisitor and Lalo was Julian’s character, one of Oz’s advisors who intensely envied them for their position.

I was actually developing a game idea and a fantasy setting sort of spun out of that. That game hasn’t come to fruition yet (if someone wants to give me a million dollars, I’ll see what I can do) but I fell in love with the setting I was making and Julian suggested we put Oz and Lalo in there to make them fully original characters.

They’ve always been rivals with sexual chemistry, because I think that’s sexy and fun to write. When we began treating them as original characters and separated them from their fandom origins, and as I grew as a writer, I started thinking more about the friction between them stemming from their core values clashing instead of surface-level personality incompatibility. I’ve always loved them, but they became a lot more compelling as a result.

Julian: I think of the ways that Oz and Lalo clash in The Vow as a ‘New And Improved’ flavor – their Inquisition iterations had a lot of fun stuff going on (political infighting, blood magic sex) but among other things they were bound by the constraints of a canon and basic storyline we didn’t invent. The Inquisition iteration featured a more overtly sexually hostile aggression going on between them, but I think reworking the two from the ground up for an original work hugely improved their potential as characters within the story.

Bigg: At a little over three hundred pages long, The Vow is a beast of a thing. How easy was it making this as your first graphic novel? Really easy, or super easy?

Arden: I will let Julian answer this because I’m just the dipshit who wrote 300 pages and said “My work here is done!” and then let them draw 300 pages.

Julian: Being fair to Arden, we didn’t jump directly in expecting it to land at this pagecount! It just naturally ended up that length, through the process of refining and putting together what we wanted the book to be. For example, I actually initially wanted to ink the book traditionally, but backed off that pretty quickly once we hit a stage in revisions and thumbnailing where it was clear this thing was headed for a triple digit pagecount.

I’ve made a few comics before The Vow, though none of them were longer than 36 pages. I would extremely strongly recommend making at least several short comics like that before tackling something of The Vow‘s size! Getting a few smaller ones under your belt does a lot to build the stamina (both physical and mental) that’s necessary for longer projects. I also used a spreadsheet tracker built by Carey Pietsch to help plan out how long the book would take and how much work I needed to be doing week by week, and that saved my ass. It helped enormously that this project was 100% our baby, something that only we could make. It would be lying to say that honking out 300 pages of comics is in any way easy, but I think the most difficult part is just that you have to get up every god damn day of your life and recommit to the decision to keep drawing the book until it’s done. For me, though, that decision was a lot easier when it meant manifesting something that I believed in this much.

Bigg: What attracted you to fantasy-horror as a genre? What were some of your biggest creative inspirations for The Vow?

Julian: Horror is my homeland, basically. I feel like it lends itself well to tapping into both the unpleasant and the sublime, two things I find myself very aggressively drawn to in any type of fiction. Junji Ito’s Uzumaki is commonly cited for its incredible visual work and arresting imagery, but for me the most standout moment in the whole work is the finale when Kirie lies down together with Shuichi. That was the first time a comic ever made me cry. I would be flattering myself to draw comparisons between my own work and Ito’s, but his ability to weave in sincere tenderness with deeply disturbing images is something I aspire to do. Fantasy works beautifully together with horror as a natural way to extend and exaggerate what’s possible within the world of a story.

As for works in more direct conversation with The Vow, I love anything with a big organization of weird guys. I still carry a torch for D. Gray-man and its ensemble cast of weirdo exorcists… the tone is very different but looking back on it I think there’s a little bit of that living still in the leather and flowy silhouettes of the Imperium outfits. The costume design on HBO Game of Thrones was also a touchstone for me in thinking about the clothing of characters, the textures and fabrics they might wear, and how these things would differ from place to place… there’s also frankly too many movies for me to name that form the backbone of my ‘something incredibly scary and fucked up happens in the woods’ visual library, but if you’ve seen The Ritual the genetics there are pretty apparent.

Arden: Fantasy and horror are natural fits together! I’ve always loved both genres separately and combining them is fun: what sorts of things are genuinely frightening to someone who can use magic? What about if you can’t use magic? What kinds of fear are possible to achieve when reality doesn’t work by our rules? And how does the fear of something like monsters change people’s lives and psyches when monsters are real?

I found inspiration in a lot of work that showed me how to blend horror and fantasy or at least made me realize that I love it when fantasy feels nasty and bad—Berserk by Kentaro Miura, parts of Dragon Age: Origins (obviously), The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington, Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, Silent Hill 3, and Ridley Scott’s Legend all come to mind. I’m also inspired to this day by the anime The Vision of Escaflowne; the confidence with which it reveals its world is seldom-matched and the way it portrays violence and trauma is breathtaking.

Bigg: Let’s dig into some specifics about the book itself for a bit. Much of The Vow is concerned with concepts of gender, passion, and partnership. What spoke to you about this mix of concepts?

Arden: The simple answer is that I like people and I like human relationships. The ways people treat each other are fascinating and complex and beautiful and messy and sad, and I like writing about all of it. If horror is Julian’s homeland, romance is mine, but there’s also a huge, wide net of relationships to write about that “romance” doesn’t exactly cover. What does a partnership mean? What makes it healthy or not? Are those things different between different people? I just love exploring the shape of relationships between people, honestly, especially when they’re complicated and sometimes painful.

And the simple answer for the gender piece of it is that I’m trans, so of course that spoke to me, but it’s not actually that simple. I’m honestly really fussy about how gender is handled in a lot of fantasy stories! I wanted to explore what gender and transness could look like in a fantasy setting that also allowed space for me to still write about transphobia and oppression. There’s a lot going on with both Oz and Lalo’s gender that we‘ve barely scratched the surface of in The Vow.

Julian: The idea of intense chemistry manifesting outside a typical loving romantic relationship is of great interest to me! I think that there’s a lot to be taken from exploring the emotions associated with attraction, and what being connected to or passionate about someone can mean in various contexts. (For more on this, please look into Michael Mann’s entire filmography.)

I also love plumbing gender within fantasy settings and how a world operating on different rules from our own might weigh on the identities of the people within it. The minutiae of what’s possible for character work within that context draws me in. For example, Lalo and Oz are both nonbinary and use the same pronouns, but Lalo responds very differently to being misgendered than Oz. They ultimately have profoundly important things in common, but they still clash against one another like hell. That kind of thing is really dense with potential for me.

Bigg: The Vow is an unapologetically erotic comic, featuring some two dozen pages of tits-out, nipple-sucking, cock-and-pubes-visible, fluids-and-everything explicit sex. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the importance of letting sex happen on the page in a comic like this.

Arden: I believe two things. The first thing is that sex scenes are valuable ways to understand how two characters relate to one another. This is especially relevant with regards to a lot of the trans characters I write; I want to show how they relate to their own bodies, how they relate to other people’s bodies, and how they want other people to relate to theirs. When we’re able to tell more stories with these characters, I want to show how these things evolve over time, as their relationships to themselves and one another change.

The second thing is that you don’t have to justify your sex scenes as being important to include them in a work. They can just be present because they’re hot! That’s fantastic too! I wanted my spouse to draw two dozen pages of explicit sex because I love their boob and clit and dick and ass and tummy drawings and I wanted to look at them! Sex is sexy and I’m sick of pretending it’s not!!!

Julian: My thoughts are I love trans dick and ass and hole and I will do whatever it takes as an artist to broadcast it more.

But seriously, it’s such a vital part of how the central relationship plays out I couldn’t imagine The Vow any other way. When I read erotica that speaks to me, I feel so powerfully energized, and I wanted to imbue our book with that same feeling for other people. Things like Oz masturbating by grinding against furniture or Lalo getting crazy worked up from being bullied and shoved around, that’s something that I very much did not want to undercut by having a fade to black or making it unclear what these two fantasize about. Sex is important to my work as an artist because sex (and our relationship to it, whatever form that takes) is a universal part of what makes us human! Especially when blood and guts are also factoring into the equation of the work, I want very much to be smearing the lines between tension and desire wherever possible.

Bigg: Much of the conflict in The Vow is between Oz and Lalo, who can’t seem to keep from shoving their thumbs into each other’s wounds. What do you think is the secret to keeping a relationship like theirs from starting to feel forced or exhausting over such a long comic?

Arden: The single most important thing is that you need to have genuinely compelling and understandable reasons for two people to hurt each other. You cannot use opposing personality traits as a shorthand for writing real conflict. You also have show at least some evolution in the relationship, even if it’s not a clear, direct “enemies to lovers” arc. Things need to change; in a longer work like The Vow, things need to change more than once. Something I hope I successfully achieved is keeping their relationship in a believable state of uncertainty and growth throughout the comic—I wanted a push-and-pull between them to keep things interesting, but I also didn’t want the push-and-pull to be predictable. You have to know when the right time to twist the knife is, and that’s a sense you develop over time the more you write and read.

Julian: Arden’s worded it basically perfectly – it’s a lot like writing good romance in that both require change and meaningful friction between the personalities. I don’t buy into a conflict without stakes or changes, any more than I buy into characters falling in love because they’re in the same room. (‘They certainly are standing next to each other,’ etc.)

Bigg: Much of The Vow gestures at a larger, vibrant world with a lot of history and moving parts. Do you see yourselves returning to this setting for more stories sometime in the future? If yes, will any of those stories concern Adi, Oz’s jugged-up undead(?) mentor, whom I am personally obsessed with?

Arden: Adipocere Will Return.™️

Serious answer: yeah, we have a lot to do in this setting, both with and without these particular characters. I don’t want to promise specifics yet, because we’re still figuring out what the shape of the next thing looks like, but please look forward to it.

Bigg: Pulling back our focus: The Vow depicts messy, sometimes-violent relationships, sex, gore, gender identities that don’t fit neatly into a binary, and a wide-spectrum view of queer love (and hate). It’s easy to imagine the sort of purity-minded person who might balk at such a story. What would you say to such a person to bring them around – and what might you say to someone who might want to tell a similarly-messy story of their own?

Arden: Honestly, I don’t want to bring them around. That’s not out of hostility or anything—I just know The Vow isn’t for everybody, or even most people, and that’s fine. Later parts of this story are going to get so heavy that I’m not even sure who the intended audience is anymore, but I’m not really making it for an audience—I’m making it for me and Julian. If people want to come along for the ride, great! If not, that’s alright too! As long as you can allow my weird freak art to exist in peace, we’re good.

As for anyone who wants to tell similarly messy stories: do it and then show it to me when you’re done so I can read/play/watch it. I deeply, intimately understand the anxiety and fear associated with making art that is not wrapped up in a neat, easily-digestible package or that explores painful subjects. So far, people’s reactions to The Vow have been more effusive than I dared to hope for, even about the things that kept me up at night imagining the worst reactions to. I can’t say for sure that your experience will be the same, or that mine will continue on as smoothly as it has been. But I *can* say there is a hunger for stories that are raw and honest, especially as we rankle against the sanitized, predictable, soulless art that every major corporation insists on telling us is the way of the future, and you *will* find peers and fans alike who want to support you. You’ll have at least two, anyway.

Julian: Yeah, there are plenty of people to whom The Vow simply won’t be of interest, and that’s okay! I simply do not need every person in the world to love our book. I don’t do art with the intent of gathering An Audience, I do it because of the supernatural curse that compels me to keep telling stories no matter what. I have no other way to lead my life but to find the joy in the process. If I’m making the work just for me and my partner, I’ll still be happy.

And of course, echoing Arden again – especially if you are inspired by our work to create something of your own in turn, please share it with us. Making art, especially the dark, complicated kind, is an exercise in vulnerability so terrifying it took me a very long time to be able to even consider doing it like this. Every time I feel afraid, like maybe I’m going out too far on this particular limb, I have to steel myself remembering that if I were someone else, the art I’m making is what I would want to see in the world. The very least I can do for others is to tell you it will always, always be worth trying. I’m rooting for you no matter what you make.

Bigg: The two of you aren’t just creative partners – you’ve also been married for five years. Creative partnerships and romantic partnerships have different, sometimes-conflicting priorities, and balancing the two can be difficult, especially over such a long-form project. Do you have any advice for other couples who might be navigating a similar mix of relationships?

Julian: I don’t know how much useful advice I can give because imo I am leading a pretty charmed life as an artist. My partner is my favorite person in the world to work with! If I had to give some actual tips, it’s that you will never go wrong trying to better understand your counterpart’s expectations and feelings on a project — your scope, how much time you can afford to commit to something (mentally and financially), things like that. Also, mutual encouragement and nurturing of each others’ skills outside of your collaborative work is so important. Someone who’s not interested in anything about your work beyond the things you’re doing With Them is not a great fit for longterm creative partnership, for example!

Arden: Julian and I have always had an incredible working relationship. Things have been so natural and easy between us since day one. I think we’re both good at keeping in mind that creative work isn’t the same as our romantic relationship, even though creativity *is* a huge part of why we love each other and how we express that love for one another. I wanted to marry them and I wanted to work with them creatively because I trust them; I trust that they’ll listen to me (and my ideas), respect me (and my ideas), and push me (and my ideas) to be the best they can be.

Bigg: How did the two of you meet? I hope it’s embarrassing.

Julian: Tumblr, mortifyingly. We were casual friends for a while before they eventually reached out to ask if I’d be interested in working together with them on a game. Our conversations expanded from just workshopping creative ideas to hanging out and chatting over long meandering Skype calls, and now here we are. Fun fact: as a casualty of meeting via Tumblr, I’m pretty sure the first time Arden heard my voice was a recording of me reading that copy for the Chunky Dunk Hydrating Lippie. And now we’re married.

Arden: The first time you heard my voice I was narrating a fanfiction about Kirby eating ass. And now we’re married.

Bigg: Let’s start wrapping up with a fun one: what’s a piece of music you think would make a good theme for The Vow? Is there music you think is particularly evocative of Oz, Lalo, or their relationship?

Julian: I’ve cobbled together so many private little playlists about these two and the larger setting/narrative… but explaining everything on there would take so much time (and also involve enormous load-bearing spoilers) so I’ll try to keep it brief. For musicians whose work is thematically suited to The Vow: Mother Mother, Chelsea Wolfe, The Paper Chase, and Keygen Church were in heavy rotation on my ‘time to lock in’ mix. Blood by Editors is a classic for songs about guys who can’t stand each other, but Fortress by Queens of the Stone Age also hits a tender little note for me regarding Oz and Lalo’s dynamic.

Arden: This took me so long to answer because I really struggled to not just hand you a full annotated playlist. I am basically doing that anyway. Sorry!

• For Oz specifically: aspirationally and in public, it’s All Hail the New Flesh by Strapping Young Lad. For their inner landscape, it’s Thing Beyond Things by Devin Townsend, including the primal scream jumpscare at the very end so don’t say I didn’t warn you

• For Lalo: I have not found a more perfect song for them in my library than On Hold by Leprous and I don’t know if I will

• For their relationship: I’m trying to stick to the way it is by the end of The Vow and not what I know it will become, so: Skin by Oingo Boingo

• For The Vow overall: Black Canyon by the incredible Dorthia Cottrell, as well as Dool’s amazing cover of Love Like Blood

Bigg: One last question for each of you: Arden, as The Vow’s writer, what are some of the things you feel most proud of accomplishing in this work?

Arden: That I finished it in the first place. I am deeply, intensely self-critical and it makes finishing anything difficult. But I did it!

Besides that: I’m glad I stuck with my gut about my writing choices. The same self-critical, self-doubting voice in my head nagged at me that no one was going to understand what was going on, what the characters’ relationships were, what the world was like. It wanted me to overexplain everything; it told me if I didn’t, the work I cared so much about would be misunderstood. I didn’t succumb to that impulse. I let the writing speak for itself, and I’ve gotten a lot of praise for it! That feels amazing.

Bigg: Julian, same question: as The Vow’s artist, what are you most proud of accomplishing over the course of making this comic?

Julian: Is ‘the whole thing’ an acceptable answer? No, but seriously, I am really proud of sticking it out to the end. Comics are a marathon, not a sprint, and I worried a lot over the years that I would lose steam or end up faltering in some way that meant the comic wouldn’t get done — I’ve dropped personal projects before, seen scores of webcomics falter because the artist simply ran out of steam, you know how it goes. That said, realizing we made it over the finish line is my new highwater mark for how accomplished I’ve ever felt about anything. I’m proud that when I table at trade shows now, I have our huge beautiful comic to wave in peoples’ faces and share in the excitement for what we made together.

Bigg: Once again, you can purchase The Vow in digital format via Itch or in physical format (while supplies last) via Etsy. I’d like to once again thank Arden and Julian from the bottom of my heart for their wonderful work on the comic and for giving me such in-depth & thoughtful responses!

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