The new series Minotaur by Si Spurrier and Mike Dowling will launch from Ignition Press in July, following a sneak preview that will arrive this Saturday on Free Comic Book Day/Comics Giveaway Day. The series features colors by Sofie Dodgson and letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
The series combines magic, technology, horror and capitalism in a story about a near-miss apocalypse that might have been more of a “hit” than people realized.
“Minotaur begins with Arthur C. Clarke’s timeless observation that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ – then runs with it,” said writer Si Spurrier. “What’s emerged, as we put this book together, is a strange and beautiful tonal confection. On the one hand it’s intimately concerned with superintelligence and emergent technologies, but it feels like nothing so much as a fusion of Hellblazer and The X-Files. Mike Dowling’s the perfect artist for this unique fusion of subject and mood, dancing between Mignola-esque horror and glittering capitalist modernity with equally chilling aplomb.”
In the book, five years have passed since a government supercomputer triggered the Singularity, an explosion of technological superintelligence that would have heralded an unimaginable future, but a failsafe cut the plug at the last moment. But something leaked through in those first picoseconds, and now the future is fighting back, manifesting as inexplicable events, miracles and monsters bleeding into the present.
Gloria Monday, a photojournalist who has been haunted and transformed by these outbreaks, travels the globe documenting them alongside an ex-military partner and a reformed tech billionaire secretly bankrolling their mission to expose it all.
“It’s been a total pleasure creating the visual world of Minotaur – from the locations, including vast landfills, cities and deserts, to the terrifying creatures that are perhaps even stranger than they appear,” Dowling said. “Si is an amazing writer, with fantastic, huge concepts grounded by detail and multi-dimensional relatable characters. I’ve attempted to match the art to our story and characters – scratchy, energetic and slightly aggressive!”
The first issue arrives July 15 with a cover by Dowling, shown above. And here’s the Comics Giveaway Day cover you can look for on Saturday:
