Vault is thrilled to announce Project Perseus, an epic new cryptid science-fiction comic book series. Written by breakout writer Jack Mulqueen, drawn by rising star Edison Neo, colored by Kike J. Díaz, lettered by Buddy Beaudoin, and designed by Tim Daniel, Project Perseus will bring readers a stylish and hilarious adventure across treacherous jungles, frozen oceans, and deadly dive bars.
In Project Perseus, it’s a race against time! When a disgraced member of a cryptid-hunting squadron vanishes with a time-traveling apparatus, Slug Stephens must sober up from a decade-long bender to track down an all-too-familiar friend turned foe.
"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.”
“Having that clarity of purpose, that creative freedom from the jump, I knew that my obligation was to truly push the artistic limits of my creative partner, Edison Neo,” continued Mulqueen. “To my dismay, I discovered that his limits do not exist... And at that juncture, I discovered a new type of freedom… That I could put anything in my script, and he would bring it to life with an excellence beyond my imagination. What remains, when the ectoplasmic dust settles, is a story that we believe encapsulates the unbridled joy of making comics, and our hopes are that that joy translates to the reading experience as well. It’s campy, it has comedy, it has jaw-dropping action sequences that will leave you poring over each and every detail, and it's got a beating heart… truisms universal within the human experience. We had a lot of fun making this book, and can't wait for the readers to join us for the ride."
"Jack approached me with the idea for Project Perseus about four years ago,” added Neo. “Hunting cryptids all over the world, even involving time travel to different eras? It was totally in my wheelhouse, I was completely sold. 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.”
“As an artist, I wanted to test my limits and see how far I could stretch my abilities,” expanded Neo. “Fortunately, working with a wildly imaginative writer like Jack, that was the biggest thing on the menu. With exotic landscapes, unique creatures, and colorful characters put in all sorts of crazy situations, I had my work cut out for me. We drew a lot of inspiration from sci-fi movies and video games, but make no mistake, the biggest inspiration was from comics. Deliberations about double-page spreads, panel layouts, covers, even down to the onomatopoeia, we wanted to make sure that this was a comic book through and through, and we are looking forward to everyone being able to pick this off the stands."
Project Perseus will debut this September with a giant 40-page first issue that will also feature a line of variant covers by a murderers' row of legendary artists, including Esad Ribic, Brett Bean, Jorge Corona, Garth Graham, and Pete Caroll.
Readers can check out 14 incredible, unlettered preview pages below:
