AfterShock Comics has been announcing a number of intereting projects that are lining up for early 2021 recently but they’re now sliding out a series to start this year. Set for a November 11th, 2020 debut, they’ll kick off the Miskatonic series that comes from writer Mark Sable and artist Giorgio Pontrelli. The book is like other first issues with the better cover material and a $4.99 price point. This is Sable’s second book with the publisher after the recent Godkillers series.
Check out what Sable has to say on his project here as well as some pages from it below.
It’s the story of Miranda Keller, one of the first female agents in what would eventually become The Bureau of Investigation, and Tom Malone, one of the few protagonists to survive H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. They’re sent by J. Edgar Hoover to the Miskatonic Valley – the setting of many of Lovecraft’s stories – to investigate a series of bombings. At first the terror seems be to the work of radicals, immigrants and other “undesirables” that Hoover wants rounded up, just as he did after a similar series of real life bombings ten years earlier when he conducted the infamous “Palmer Raids”. In reality, it’s a white supremacist occult conspiracy, and can only be stopped by the very people that Hoover detests.
It takes what’s thrilling about famous Lovecraft stories such as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, “Herbert West: Re-Animator” and “The Dunwich Horror” (among others) but reworks them so that the characters that Lovecraft had issues with – like women – are center stage.
At its heart though, it’s a kind of reverse X-files. Miranda is the highly capable but skeptical FBI agent, while Tom is the true believing ex-cop, traumatized by his contact with the supernatural.
I’m a huge Lovecraft fan that wants to celebrate what’s great about his cosmic horror while turning some of his backwards thinking on its head. I’m also a history buff and a fan of crime fiction, and it’s a chance to tell a noirish tale set against the backdrop of the Red Scare. There are a lot of parallels between Lovecraft and Hoover’s period and today – a country coming out of a pandemic, about to fall into the a depression and a federal government obsessed with demonizing anyone it deems subversive or alien. It’s a way to explore forgotten history and let the reader draw some parallels with some of the real life horrors we’re dealing with today.
And most of all, Artist Giorgio Pontrelli is master of blending crime and horror and he brings our characters to vivid life…even the dead (and undead) ones.”
Plot Concept: Miskatonic Valley holds many mysteries – cultists worshipping old gods, a doctor deadset on resurrecting the recently deceased, a house overrun by rats in the walls – but none more recent than a series of bombings targeting the Valley’s elite.
These horrors reach a breaking point when the brilliant, hard-nosed investigator Miranda Keller is sent to stop the bombings. To J. Edgar Hoover, there can be no other explanation than those responsible for similar actions during the Red Scare of the 1920s…but when Miranda digs too deep, she uncovers an unimaginable occult conspiracy, one that may cost Miranda her job – and her sanity.
