Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Nathan Fox's new graphic novel features psychopathic hookers, gene-splicing awesomeness

Posted by Peter Rugg on Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 6:00 AM

click to enlarge This culture doesn't have enough stories about mutants in Singapore.
  • This culture doesn't have enough stories about mutants in Singapore.

Last year, The Pitch named Kansas City Art Institute grad Nathan Fox Best Illustrator for his "hyper-detailed" work on such comics as Dark Reign: Zodiac and Joe R. Lansdale's Pigeons From Hell. Fox's new project, Fluorescent Black, is just further proof we picked the right guy.

Originally published in installments in Heavy Metal (magazine of

brutal music, murderous robots, and extreme boobage) Fluorescent

Black tells a classic rich vs. poor story, except it all takes place

with genetically modified humans in the year 2085 in South East Asia.

Here's the way Heavy Metal tells it:

A superior named Nina is the test model for cutting edge genetic

designs. She is a paragon of physical and mental health: her brain and

body represent billions of dollars worth of corporate research and

development. During a bio-terrorist attack, Nina is kidnapped by a

street gang and taken across the border into a ghetto full of man-made

splice animals, psychopathic hookers, drug addled freaks, deadly

insects, poisonous ecosystems, and abandoned tenements.

As great as that sounds, Fox actually turned the project down twice before he was finally able to find time in his schedule to take on illustration duties. He described the three-year journey of finishing the story with writer Matt Wilson as a labor of love. 

"I really enjoy the science-fiction struggle of it all, and the science involved, knowing that it's based on research happening right now," Fox says. "And that there was sex and violence but that the sex and violence stuff had a purpose.

"I was a huge fan of Heavy Metal stuff as a kid, like everyone else -- sneaking peaks when I shouldn't or wasn't allowed -- and I started looking at it again after years of not checking it out. Aside from the nostalgia of wanting to get into it, they'd really done a bang-up job of actually amping things up in the magazine. So it was a great opportunity."

The book is a limited run of 500 copies that comes out in July. It's now available for pre-order.

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