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Mythic wizards meet retro rocket ships in Image Comics' lush new landscape format series 'Echolands'
Heralding from the visionary creative minds that delivered DC's award-winning Batwoman series and presented in an alluring horizontal "landscape format" featuring double-page spreads, a new mythic-fiction epic from Image Comics is poised to shatter your expectations of the comic book art form in myriad ways.
Written by J. H. Williams III (Promethea, The Sandman: Overture, Batman) and W. Haden Blackman (Star Wars, Elektra), then accented with striking artwork courtesy of Williams, Eisner Award winning colorist Dave Stewart (Hellboy), and ace letterer Todd Klein, Echolands #1 arrives Aug. 25 — and SYFY WIRE has a special preview to indulge your senses.
This enveloping saga, some 10 years in the making, begins in a strange futuristic world that has forgotten its own history. A reckless hooded thief, Hope Redhood, holds the key to dissecting its dark, unsettling past—if only she and her gang can escape a tyrannical wizard and his ruthless daughter. However, fate will send them all on an odd odyssey leading to an inevitable war between worlds.
Echolands is a rapid-paced mashup adventure that immerses readers in everything from horror movie vampires to old-school mobsters and cyborg elves, to Roman demigods, cowboys, phantasms, and retro rocket ships. In addition to the standard monthly issues, each chapter of Echolands will offer a revealing Raw Cut edition, showcasing the unadorned artwork exactly as it appeared leaving Williams' work studio.
"The process for this page was an unusual choice on how to indicate location," Williams tells SYFY WIRE. "We didn't have much room to show a traditional location shot and still get the other story information into the scene without it becoming cramped. So, we opted for making the panel shapes themselves sort of become our location indication, the panels are virtually windows into the scene, featuring building construction textures and decorative elements that enhance the strange architecture of our altered San Francisco. This is all reinforced by our villain's deployed drone that moves around the page, spying in on the scene. The result is a unique presentation."
Blackman commented on one of our exclusive two-page spreads that spotlights some of the more unusual denizens that inhabit Echolands.
“This is one of my favorite exchanges in Issue 1 because it shows how Hope’s impetuousness launches the whole adventure that follows," Blackman tells SYFY WIRE. "It’s also a great mashup of characters, from our Cor, our Hun in biker leathers, to Dusty, the cowboy standing watch at the door."
Now trek into our exclusive peek at Image Comics' Echolands #1 (Aug. 25) in the full gallery below.
