Vault Comics has announced Project Perseus by writer Jack Mulqueen and artist Edison Neo, a cryptid science-fiction series arriving in September.
The series is about a disgraced member of a cryptid-hunting squadron who has to sober up from a decade-long bender to track down a former friend who has vanished with a time-traveling apparatus. The chase takes Slug across jungles, frozen oceans and dive bars.
“This story was born from a desire to tell a tale that could only be told in the medium of comics,” said Mulqueen. “At the time when the story was conceived, there was a lot of discourse regarding the medium of comics being used as an IP farm for other mediums, people using comics as spec-scripts and proof of concept, in hopes their work would get optioned to television or film. From the start, we knew we wanted to tell a story that would be so batshit insane, that it would be prohibitively expensive to recreate it in any other medium, and therefore, it would be a story that would belong singularly to comics.”
Neo, who has been developing the project with Mulqueen for four years, said the goal was to push every visual limit the medium allows.
“Hunting cryptids all over the world, even involving time travel to different eras? It was totally in my wheelhouse, I was completely sold,” Neo said. “Since then, we have been putting every effort into fleshing out this idea into the biggest, craziest, most action-packed story we could ever imagine, and as the fantasy of the book coming to life became reality, we went even harder and went several notches higher. Beyond the bombastic nature of the story, however, it would be nothing if it were not centered around a cast of rich and nuanced characters.”
Colorist Kike J. Díaz, letterer Buddy Beaudoin, and designer Tim Daniel round out the creative team. Here’s a look inside:
Project Perseus #1 arrives in September.