Christofer Emgård and Tomás Aira, who previously combined eldritch horror with war stories in Dark Horse Comics’ The Secret Land and The Whispering Dark, will once again team for Beyond the Pale. Letterer Maguro Mantella joins them on the new miniseries, which brings their trademark “impending doom” approach to the Vietnam War.
“The senseless insanity of the Vietnam War lends itself especially well to tales of inexplicable horror,” Emgård said. “Beyond the Pale is my humble attempt to capture some of that madness onto the page, and Tomás has outdone himself in depicting the moist, suffocating jungle and the young, forsaken soldiers lost in its dark embrace.”
The story starts with a journalist investigating missing Black soldiers at the aptly named “Firebase Tartarus”:
War correspondent Hetta Sawyer is looking into the disproportionate loss of Black soldiers in the Vietnam War. Leads say losses are especially high at Firebase Tartarus, with most of them have simply gone missing, their fate unknown. Something sinister is happening at Tartarus, and Hetta intends to uncover the truth.
“I’ve been working on it for more than a year,” Aira said. “It has immersed me into this hellish world and now I hope to bring the readers in! It’s my most intricate and detailed art yet.”
Look for the first issue of four on June 5.