If comic book fans are looking for a new science-fiction epic, Tartarus is a book to watch out for. The upcoming book from Image Comics is the product of writer Johnnie Christmas (Angel Catbird), Jack T. Cole (The Unsound), and Jim Campbell (Giant Days), telling the story of an innocent daughter caught in the crossfire of her mother’s actions.
Tartarus is a post-modern mix of African myth and tradition, following the daughter of a warlord framed by the military after her connection to her mother and legacy are discovered. The book features stunning art from Cole, and continues the Christmas’ transition to writing after penning his own original graphic novel Firebug and collaborating and drawing the art on Margaret Atwood’s Angel Catbird. Screen Rant is pleased to offer new details from the creative team, and preview pages ahead of the book’s release on February 12th.
Christmas discusses his desire to create a decade-spanning story, allowing core characters to evolve and change over time:
Check out those pages Christmas describes, exclusively provided to Screen Rant.
“We wanted to create a sprawling mythology of how our world and its characters evolved through decades, not just a simple snapshot. The best speculative fiction shows cause and effect over vast stretches of time, and that’s what gives Jack’s intoxicating, alien cosmos such relatable gravity—the way our characters grapple with love, legacy, and violence in profound ways. I’ve never tried anything like this in any of my other comics.”
In this scene, Tilde finds out that her mom was an infamous warlord, as does the Baxna Empire—her mother’s sworn enemy. What happens next sets Tilde on a course that changes her life forever. With Tartarus, the idea of one’s legacy not being looked upon as a good thing was there right from the beginning. The expectations and fears of others based on her family’s reputation, what it represents, and those fears multiplied over the course of a generation. How will Tilde react? Will she lean into or run away from it? And will the weight of it change her for better or worse?”
With the first issue of Tartarus making a major time jump, Cole discusses his approach to conveying that evolution that stylistically, through the character’s clothing:
Cole’s art has an impressive amount of care and detail. It’s going to be fascinating to see how his art evolves as the story progresses. From the previews alone, Tartarus looks to be a massive, gorgeous ride with unique storytelling and characters. With Christmas and Cole firing at all cylinders on this project, the book is clearly set up to be epic in every sense of the word.
In Tartarus, 18 years pass between the events of the first half of the first issue and the second half. The main way I tried to convey this was through clothing. The uniforms are similar to how they were in style before, but go from red to white. The earrings they have, which I imagined to designate rank, have been replaced by an article of fabric that goes over the shoulders. The soldiers’ gear has gone from more tactical to the Greco-Armor seen aboard the spaceship, and the black suit material that goes up to the necks of other personnel changes from a sharp line to a round one at the cheeks.
I picked clothing as a way to mark the change of time, because the change in location is so different between the halves of the issue. Clothing was the most common thing, other than the faces of characters who appear then, and appear now, that acts as a throughline between the two story arcs.
Tartarus lands in comic shops on February 12th, 2020.
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