Disaster Inc. #1 / $4.99 / 32 pages / Color / On sale 04.01.20
Writer: Joe Harris
Artist & Colorist: Sebastian Piriz
Letterer: Carlos M. Mangual
Cover: Andy Clarke w/ Jose Villarrubia
Incentive Cover: Cully Hamner
In 2011, the worst earthquake in Japan’s history breached the costal Fukushima Daiichi power plant, causing three of its four nuclear reactors to melt down. Forced evacuations followed as the event released enough radioactive material into the air, ground and water to force officials to set up an “Exclusion Zone”, effectively sealing off the land for what may well be the rest of human history.
But that’s only if you don’t have the right connections and the desire to experience catastrophe, failure and misery as it really is! Enter DISASTER INC., an underground tourism outfit intent on helping people of means, secrets and agendas explore the dark corners and off-map attractions typical tour groups won’t go to (and various laws don’t allow). Only Fukushima, known for its famed warrior class and their protection of the land and people dating back to ancient times, is full of deadly surprises and old ghosts.
Writer Joe Harris (Great Pacific, Rockstars, The X-Files) and artist Sebastián Piriz begin a disaster tour checking out the worst places on earth while digging up more trouble than they can probably handle. Then, in a world on fire and rife with calamity, catastrophe, war and unrest… you’re going to need the right guides to see it for yourself!
JOE HARRIS ON WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT AND WHY HE’S EXCITED FOR IT TO COME OUT:
“The story follows a group of “disaster tourists” who charter this underground organization to guide them inside the Japanese no-man’s land known as the “Exclusion Zone” surrounding the site of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown. But they quickly learn there’s more to worry about than radioactive fallout, or just getting busted, when they find themselves both hunted and haunted by the ghosts of those same warriors who protected this land from invaders for almost a thousand years: the Samurai.
Much of the area around Fukushima will never be habitable by humans again while, at the same time, nature has strangely reclaimed it. Abandoned villages sit overgrown with vegetation. Rusted cars lie abandoned on forgotten roads. Packs of animals run free without people around, oblivious to the radiation they spread. But that’s not all that’s in the soil and the water. The bones of generations of some of the fiercest fighters the world has ever known are down there too. And what I’m most excited about is the supernatural twist on things as these ghost warriors return and resume their bloody calling.”
JOE HARRIS ON SOME OF THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE PROJECT:
“When I was a film student, I became a big fan of Akira Kurosawa movies, Toshiro Mifune, and stories of the Samurai. I re-read Frank Miller’s “Ronin” as much as any other comic series I grew up adoring. But I’ve also been interested in the concept of underground tourism for a while. It probably started with stories of people bun geeing off the Brooklyn Bridge at night, or massive raves deep inside the New York City subway tunnels, or the guys who climbed the World Trade Center Freedom Tower before it opened to the public and filmed their BASE jump from the very top. But disaster tourism is an even more problematic kind of thrill-seeking. It’s exploitation of tragedy by people with the means to tour the ruins of Chernobyl, or post-Katrina New Orleans, or a recently abandoned ISIS camp and (usually) return safely.
JOE HARRIS ON WHEN/HOW HE FIRST HEAR OF AFTERSHOCK COMICS:
“Mike Marts recently reminded me that we first worked together twenty years ago, when we were just babies at Marvel. I know Joe Pruett almost as long. When AfterShock was announced, it felt like something exciting was happening and I wanted to be a part of it.”
JOE HARRIS ON (3) REASONS WHY COMIC FANS SHOULD ADD THIS TITLE TO THEIR PULL LIST:
“My collaborator, Sebastián Piriz is a wonderful artist who’s killing it on both the line art and colors (those are two good reasons, frankly). But it also features some pretty creepy supernatural horror and grisly, bloody battles. Also: Samurai swords.”
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