In these turbulent times, publishers are looking for different ways to get their comics out there, and Vault Comics has been giving away selected #1 issues to retailers since last year – and the program is a hit, with more than $1,750,000 worth of comics and more than 350,000 single issues distributed.
This Free-to-Retailers Program is now expanding with Something Crawled Out #1, a new horror series co-created by writer Son M. and artist Cas ‘MadCursed’ Peirano.
The program launched last year with Christopher Yost and Val Rodrigues’ Unnatural Order #1, Zack Kaplan & Fabiana Mascolo’s Beyond Real #1, and Michael Moreci & Nathan Gooden’s Barbaric: Born in Blood #1. It offers retailers a chance to sample the books and sell them at cover price, give them away or discount them. As mentioned above, with more than 350,000 copies distributed, retailers seem to like the idea.
With Something Crawled Out, they’ll get a disturbing horror tale, as the title indicates.
Something wicked crawled out screaming.
Edith “Eddie” Miller has no grand plans or great prospects. She spends her days sleeping in and her nights working shifts at a gas station. But when her younger sister fails to come home, Eddie unearths a web of missing girls and rotting bodies. The police prove useless, so Eddie teams up with her best friend, Rainer, in a desperate hunt to find her sister. The only thing is-Eddie believes her best friend might be the Devil himself.
Co-creator Son M has a background in comics, novels and gaming, with a prose novel also out this year. “Love is a violent thing. I’ve always been obsessed with the inherent connection between brutality and beauty, and the way we express our relationships in different ways” she says of the new Vault title. “Something Crawled Out is about two desperate people trying to save someone they love, and thus committing unspeakable acts of violence onto others along the way. I’ve always wanted to write horror that was so tied to expressions of the Final Girl trope, mixed with the active presence of the Hunter. Rather than reacting to the tragedies around her, Eddie is constantly causing devastation in her desperation to find her sister.”
MadCursed, a newish artist on the scene, adds, “Reading the Something Crawled Out scripts, I was immediately drawn to the devilish aura surrounding the characters. I really enjoy stories where the arc isn’t always self-improvement, but rather, self-destruction. There’s a violence in a lot of these characters in Something Crawled Out and a lot of the circumstances they face bring it out in terrible ways. And yet, despite all the horrors happening, you still find yourself rooting for them. You want them to win.”
“We live in an undeniably dangerous world,” says editor Der-shing Helmer, “and the notion of civilized society is often our shield against it. Something Crawled Out removes the veneer of civility and asks the reader, if nobody else was around to see, how far would you go to protect your own against monsters? The answer is darker than you might imagine…but aren’t you desperately curious to see the true face you’ve been hiding all along?”
Something Crawled Out #1 hits shelves in July. Written by Son M., drawn by Cas ‘MadCursed’ Peirano, colored by Vittorio Astone, lettered by Jim Campbell, and designed by Tim Daniel, variant covers include Chris Shehan, Nathan Gooden, Cathy Kwan, Rennerei, Priscilla Bampoh, & more.
