Imagine you’ve died. Doesn’t matter how. It’ll probably be doing something mundane. Except instead of the eternal void or whatever your religion may have taught you, you find yourself on a fantasy battlefield, surrounded by soldiers from throughout history, fighting skeleton warriors and being guided by a fairy who kind of looks like Wilford Brimley. He tosses you a shield and a sword and says, “Fight. It’s the right thing to do.”
This (more or less) is the opening of End After End, a new Vault Comics series launching next month from writers David Andry (Resonant) and Tim Daniel (The Plot), artist Sunando C, colorist Kurt Michael Russell and letterer Jim Campbell, with burger boss Liana Kangas on variant covers.
The official synopsis:
Life is nothing if not a series of endings. School. Jobs. Friendships. Love. Until THE end. Walter Willem’s end was fast and unexpected. His was an unremarkable life. So how is it that his story continues as cannon fodder in an endless war waged against an insatiable darkness hellbent on consuming all of existence? And is Walter right in believing he’s arrived in the midst of this titanic battle as the one destined to finally end it?
“The story behind the End After End is really the story of how Tim Daniel saved me,” Andry said in comments supplied by Vault.
“We were both feeling burned out before we started to co-write. As the last issues of Resonant were hitting the stands (Issue #10 came out in June 2021), I started to get pretty discouraged about the comic industry. We were several months into the pandemic, and I was back to writing things that would probably never see the light of day. I considered quitting several times. It was at this moment that Tim called up and decided it was time for us to work together.
“Tim and I have been friends for years, and he has always been supportive of my writing career, often giving me feedback on scripts and advice on the industry itself. Over the years, we toyed with the idea of working on something together, but it had never come to fruition. Until now.
“Tim said he was open to writing anything. Anything but fantasy.
“’Well …,’ I said, ‘I’ve got this fantasy idea.’”
Daniel, at least in the comments provided, did not respond with, “You son of a bitch.”
“All it took was one call and five hours later we had mapped out the entirety of a war-fantasy tale that was then entitled, At The Moment of Your Death,” Daniel said. “Strangely enough, a couple of weeks into the project, my 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, handed me a sketch, and at the top of the page she’d written ‘End After End.’
“Now look, the universe can point you in a direction, and all you really must do is open yourself up to the possibilities.”
“Tim’s dislike of certain aspects of fantasy really helped to shape End After End,” Andry said. “There were no fancy wizards, no complicated histories and no confusing rules governing magic. This was fantasy at the ground level. A war story from the view of a footsoldier. A grunt in the mud.”
Said artist Sunando C: “When Tim and I first started talking about what I wanted to do at Vault, I told him that I really wanted to work on something with a lot of world-building and design, something huge and epic in scale, and with End After End, DB and Tim really delivered.”
Check out our exclusive preview, and get your typical solicit deets below.
END AFTER END #1
Writers: Tim Daniel and David Andry
Artist: Sunando C
Colorist: Kurt Michael Russell
Letterer: Jim Campbell
Designer: Tim Daniel
Cover A: Sunando C
Cover B: Liana Kangas
On Sale: 8/24/2022
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts WMQ&A: The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
