Series Reveal: Mechs vs. Kaiju vs. family drama in Tres Dean's new Vault Comics series 'We Ride Titans'

Your family can spend generations strapping into mechs and saving the world from giant monsters, but that can't save them all from the problems waiting for them at home. That's the setup behind Vault Comics' epic new miniseries We Ride Titans, a story that blends the sci-fi spectacle of Pacific Rim with the messy family dynamics of Shameless — and we've got an exclusive first look right here.

Written by Tres Dean (All Time Low: Young Renegades, For Your Consideration: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and work right here at SYFY WIRE) and drawn by Sebastián Piriz (Disaster Inc., Black Beacon), We Ride Titans is set in a world where kaiju are a constant threat. To combat this, humanity has developed giant mechs known as Titans, and created crews to pilot them into battle to face the monster menace. Riding a Titan makes you a celebrity not unlike a Formula One race car driver, but it comes with a price. Kit Hobbs is a member of a Titan-piloting family that's been protecting New Hyperion for generations, but despite the prestige of the job, the Hobbs family is falling apart. With her father and her brother both facing their own internal crises, Kit's got plenty to deal with at home, to say nothing of the 20-story creatures she faces at work.

“There are some stories where you just know, and when I first started scribbling out the bones of what would become We Ride Titans on the Long Island Railroad in the summer of 2018 I knew," Dean said. "Having spent several years in the industry at that point I'd long wondered what my first creator-owned book would end up being. I often figured it would come down to whatever got picked up by a publisher first, leading to years and years of turning every single inkling of an idea I had into something I could show to a publisher. It changed with We Ride Titans. I stopped trying to cater to genre, to trends, and to archetypes and instead built all of those things around themes I wanted (or maybe needed) to work with. The result: a big, bombastic story about mecha and kaiju with all of the questions I had about family, siblings, pain, anger, and the possibility of reconciliation at the core. By the time my train let me off at the Bellmore stop I knew this was the one — and that I'd do whatever it took to make sure that ended up being the case."

In the gallery below, you can get a look at the fruits of those efforts through covers and interior pages for We Ride Titans, as the Hobbs family goes to work battling kaiju, and lets a little swagger loose in covers by Piriz and Joshua Hixson.

“I gotta be honest, it's giant robots vs Kaiju," Piriz said. "Tres didn't need to say anything more to have me onboard. But then I read the story treatment, and the scripts. It is a great story that will hit home for most of the people. And all this working for one of the best publishers in comics. Working for Vault was in my bucket list since they launched their first books. You can't ask for much more than this.”

As the pages above suggest, We Ride Titans is out to deliver massive doses of grand-scale action alongside a story of family, cycles of trauma, and trying to save yourself while saving the world. For Dean, it represents all of that, plus a long road to finally achieving the goal of launching his first creator-owned series, which makes it that much sweeter.

"I sure didn't know it'd be over three years before those first pages in my notebook came to fruition, but to have made the book this way and with this team makes the wait worthwhile," he said. "Sebastian has been the artist I've wanted to tell this story with since day one and Vault has been the dream home for it from the moment pen hit paper. It's been a long road to getting this book made and I can't wait for the comics world to see it. This team isn't knocking on the door - we're breaking it down and storming through with all the might of a hundred-story mech.”

The five-issue story begins when We Ride Titans #1 arrives from Vault Comics on December 15.