Via Syfy Wire, comiXology have announced “40 Seconds,” a five-issue miniseries from writer Jeremy Haun (“The Red Mother”), artist Chris Mitten (“Witchfinder: The Reign of Darkness”), colorist Brett Weldele, and letterer/designer Thomas Mauer launching next week.
A sci-fi series, the book follows a group of explorers charting unexplored space with the use of “gates” that “forge” the wormholes necessary for faster-than-light travel. (These paths require 40 seconds to open, hence the title.) “When we first join them, they’re not just exploring space, but also trying to find out what happened to the team who went in before them and was never heard from again. As the journey begins, one mystery gives birth to others, as the crew finds themselves hunted by a mysterious force.”
Haun told Syfy, “I remember reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series as a kid. That brand of stranger in a strange land science fiction always captured my imagination. Of course, because I’m me, I can’t not bring some element of weird cosmic horror to the stories I tell. There was no way the influence of things like Alien weren’t going to seep into this story. I was just thinking about Black Hole while writing a moment in the final issue. That movie weirded me out so much as a kid.”
Mitten added, “I have a huge soft spot for drawing sci-fi and fantasy stories and have been fortunate enough to do a number of them over the years; they’re so much fun — the scale and scope of everything, the world-building, the chance to play in one alien landscape for a bit before, maybe even just a few pages later, jumping somewhere else entirely. This sort of thing, these stories, they’re right in my wheelhouse; I’ve been drawing this type of thing, in some form or another, for as long as I’ve been drawing, so the look and feel tends to come fairly easily, really. And working with Jeremy on something like this, someone who just has a natural flair for writing, made it even easier.”
“40 Seconds” #1 will be released on comiXology and Kindle on August 25, and like all comiXology Originals, it will be available for free to subscribers of comiXology Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited, and Amazon Prime. Head on over to Syfy Wire for an eight-page preview of the first issue now.
