Boom! Studios has a lot of confidence in UNTHINKABLE, my upcoming thriller coming out in May. So much so that they released not the usual five, but a ten page preview. Why show almost half the book up front? Because we believe that the 2nd half is just that good.
Major Spoilers
Newsarama
Splash Page Previews
For those of you who don't know, Unthinkable is based on a real-life government program. After 9/11, there were many who felt like what happened was out of a Tom Clancy novel, or a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Some people in the government took this seriously, and created a think tank made up of novelists and screenwriters. Their task was to come up with worst case terror scenarios. If we could imagine the next 9/11 before the terrorists did - maybe we could stop that.Where I depart into the realm of fiction is with Alan Ripley, a young Tom Clancy-esque novelist who joins this Think Tank when his brother is killed in 9/11. Eight years afterwards, he finds that the nightmare terrorist scenarios he envisioned have started to come true. Now, it's up to him to stop them. The problem - just because you write about action heroes doesn't mean you can be one.
I've never been more proud of a project, creator-owned or otherwise. Much of that is due to the great work of Julian Totino Tedesco, who does the interiors you'll see on those ten pages. Paul Azaceta, my first ever collaborator on Grounded does the covers. That's the cover for Issue #2 above. Issue #1 however will be out in May.
Unthinkable has been the reason I haven't posted more - it took incredible research, and I put nearly as much into the marketing - which involved an ARG (Altered or Alternate Reality Game) - as I did the comic. I plan on posting more soon - at the very least links to the many interviews I've done, the reviews (which are not out yet, but should be coming sooner than you think), and behind the scenes stuff.
I've agreed to do a "director's commentary" for the ARG. If that goes one, I've always wanted to do one for an actual comic, being a process junkie (or just a narcissist) myself. I think this is a book that lends itself to it, because of the amount of research, ties to the real world and the ARG etc. I'd love to get some others involved - maybe Julian, marketing/gure Chip Mosher and the rest of the ARG team (Dafna Pleban and Ian Brill), Paul, series editors Mark Waid and Matt Gagnon etc. My priority is the book, but I don't want readers of this blog to think I've forgotten about it.
