Writer Christopher Sebela (“Crowded”) and artist Jen Hickman (“Moth & Whisper”) are surveying the future in their new Vault Comics series, “Test.”
Paste broke the news that Sebela and Hickman will be teaming for the new sci-fi series, which follows protagonist (and bodyhacker) Aleph Null’s attempts to find a “mythical, Midwestern town named Laurelwood – where they’re test-marketing the future.”
According to a statement released at Paste, the series is at least partially inspired by Sebela’s time spent working at a marketing research firm, a place where a series of shadily motivated people attempted to figure out what people just like them wanted out of life.
“The things that came back to me were all the secret parts of that world,” said Sebela. “Respondents would show up in wigs and with fake names, wanting to evade the rules, telling their friends about it, a whole underground network of people who went from one market research firm to another, making a tidy (untaxable) cash income. All of which was just a small corner of the ocean of marketing — whose depths shaped TV line-ups and swallowed entire towns in its pursuit to quantify capitalism into an easy formula of wants and needs.”
“One pocket universe of marketers, professional guinea pigs, junkies, bodyhackers and others would give birth to another,” continued Sebela, “and they all began to converge in ‘Test’.”
Colorist Harry Saxon and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou will join Sebela and Hickman on their journey to Laurelwood, a journey which Aleph Null may not survive. To learn more about the series and see some uncolored preview pages from Hickman, be sure to click over to Paste. “Test” #1 will be released sometime this summer.
