Matt Kindt’s sublime “MIND MGMT” ends this August, but Kindt is already at work on his next series for Dark Horse Comics. Announced today, Kindt’s next project is called “Dept. H,” and focuses on Mia, a secret agent pretending to be a journalist, on assignment deep underwater to investigate a homicide in the world’s deepest underwater drill. Something goes wrong, and Mia finds herself leading a team of survivors as the underwater station slowly fills up with water.
“My greatest fear is drowning,” Kindt says, in an interview with Paste Magazine. “I can swim. I’m not terrified of water. I’m scared of being underwater, I guess. I think there’s a lot of stuff there I want to deal with, as far as psychology.”
Although it bears elements of The Abyss and “The Wake,” Kindt has already imagined numerous ways to approach the aesthetic and design of the book to make it particularly Matt Kindty. For instance, the series will embrace a sort of “real-time” storytelling technique, where each issue covers a 24 hour period as the underwater station floods. Kindt promises tension will rise along with the water level.
“There’s not going to be a way to save the base that’s filling up,” Kindt says. “I like the idea that every month, the water gets a little bit deeper. Literally, it gets deeper. There’s going to be design elements to track the rise of the water, sort of this impending doom. So every month, there’s going to be a little gauge at the edge of paper. So when you collect the whole book or you stack the issues up, you’ll be able to see the water on the edge of the pages rising.”
Kindt will write and draw this new monthly series, and his wife, Sharlene Kindt, will handle the coloring. Sharlene Kindt was actually the one who taught Matt Kindt how to use watercolor, and her work has appeared a handful of times throughout “MIND MGMT”‘s run. “We’re going to do a mix of more subdued stuff, and there are are going to be parts of the story that call for crazy, bonkers, over-the-top color. She can do both of those,” Matt Kindt says.
Check out more of his announcement interview at Paste Magazine. Dark Horse has not set a release date for “Dept. H.” as of this posting, but we at Multiversity Comics will keep you updated with information as we learn it.
