Created by Daniel Kraus and Dani comes an eerie superhero OGN.
Get ready for the most disturbing superhero story ever told. Forrest Molson is going nowhere. One year out of high school—and one year into sobriety—she's working with her father as assistant groundskeeper at Athanasia Cemetery, the final resting place of fallen members of the Dynamic Guild, Venture City's resident superheroes. At her lowest point, Forrest discovers Athanasia's darkest secret. At night, the cemetery soil bleeds a substance created from the ooze of rotting superheroes. This ooze becomes Forrest's new drug—and she's intent on using the unpredictable powers it bestows to be judge, jury, and executioner of Venture City's evil citizens. But, as she loses her mind to her new addiction, she inches closer to becoming the most evil of all. ATHANASIA is a superhero story seen through the darkest lens.
“ATHANASIA is six years in the making and that's because I -- and the whole team -- have approached it with as much care as possible. It was a dream of mine to work with Dani,” said Kraus. “I wanted to work with Vault again. And so there was some waiting for those stars to align. But I never got weary or impatient. This thing has been a labor of love from the very first moment I had the idea. Speaking of the idea, it first came to me when I was approached by one of the Big Two to do a superhero comic for an established character. It was an odd invite, because I'm not a superhero guy. At all. I can't stress that enough. My pitch was accepted but it ended up falling apart for business reasons. That ended up being hugely fortuitous, because got me thinking: What would I do if left to my own devices to write a superhero story?
“Within about ten minutes of thinking about it, my brain went ‘superhero cemetery,’" continued Kraus. “What would happen to the soil if you buried superheroes close together? Very quickly, the answer led me down a story path toward addiction, and the lengths we go to excuse our behaviors. Even if you haven't experienced the former, you surely understand the latter.
"Though I was writing a superhero story, I had no interest in heroism on a major scale. It was only small, personal acts of heroism that interested me. The larger sense of heroism as it applies to superheroes has always felt simplistic and overly optimistic to me. Powers of superhero magnitude would warp one as absolutely as any absolute power does. Also, Dani is a genius, and I will never, ever forget the dazzled delight I would feel upon seeing each batch of new pages for the time.”
"When I was approached by Daniel Kraus and got introduced to the world of Athanasia, I was in a weird place in my life," added Dani. "I was taking care of my grandmother who was bedbound and in the last months of her life and my parents were sick and trapped abroad during covid. Reading about Forrest's story hit me hard.
“This book is about family issues, battling with addiction and struggling for inner balance,” continued Dani. “Also, Daniel and I share the same approach to the superhero genre and its darker layers so this was a project I instantly knew I wanted to be a part of.
“The relationships Daniel created in this book are so delicate and fragile. As an artist, showcasing this through my linework was important so I took the creative choice of renewing my normal style of heavy blocks of ink and replacing it with textured pen scratches. This doubled the workload considering the length of the book but was totally worth it. Pairing that with Brad Simpson's excellent color choices and we ended up with a visual I'll always be proud of.”
ATHANASIA will be published as a 256-page deluxe graphic novel and can be found in comic and bookstores everywhere this October.