THE RUSH: ANNOUNCEMENT
Cover A by Nathan Gooden
Cover B by Martin Simmonds
Cover C by Tim Daniel
Interior art by Nathan Gooden and Addison Duke
Interior art by Nathan Gooden and Addison Duke
“A stranger comes to town...”
Vault Comics is going to the gold rush era in This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills — or, to use its abbreviated title, THE RUSH — a chilling western-horror series by writer Si Spurrier, (Way of X, Hellblazer, Coda), artist Nathan Gooden (Barbaric, Brandon Sanderson's Dark One), colorist Addison Duke (Barbaric, Vampire: The Masquerade), letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (The Blue Flame, Engineward) and designer Tim Daniel. Martin Simmonds (The Department of Truth, Friendo) will provide variant covers.”
THE RUSH drops OCTOBER 2021.
Herebelow, my scattergun thoughts and deathrattle brainfarts on the new series:
A stranger comes to town.
The town is a cursed camp in a frozen valley where every heart, every mind, every morsel of energy and effort, is fixated on a single thing: gold. A cold bounty locked in permaforst.
The stranger is a mother. She just wants to find her son.
But something terrible and ancient is at work in the forests and creeks - something that leaves giant spidertracks in the snow, something that feeds on the avarice of human hearts - and it doesn’t take kindly to the love and loss which makes our heroine immune to its influence.
She, and she alone, doesn’t give a damn for gold.
This will not stand.
In the dying days of the 19th century, 100,000 ordinary people from all across the world sold up everything they owned, wasted every last penny on useless gear and worthless supplies, and set their hopeful hearts upon a hellish, year-long trek through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. Many died - often by their own hands - in starvation and scurvy and despair. Few made it beyond the mountains and frozen cataracts of the Yukon river. Fewer still stayed when they reached their destination, their hopes shattered by what they found there. The most brutal conditions imaginable, where every inch of dirt had to be melted by brazier before being dug; where a man could spend six months digging to bedrock only to find nothing; where every nugget found was soon liberated by a parade of hucksters, robbers, dance-hall conmen and price-gougers.
Almost none of the arrivals realized the impossible dream of striking it rich in the barren, bitter lands around a mean little creek known as the Klondike. And - more troubling - those who did? Almost every one of the great Bonanza Kings ended their lives in ruin, destitution and despair.
The truth?
The gold was never the point.
I’ve been waiting to tell this story for years. At last, a project that lets me fuse together my most persistent preoccupations -- myths, the horrors of human desire and the power of stories -- with my hitherto unexplored geekiness for history.
In The Rush we’re telling a tale from the last great gold stampede: an episode of human endurance so precisely recorded that, after hundreds of hours of research, those of us making The Rush can feel the rough woodgrain of every creaking sled, hear the screams of every starving horse deserted on the trail, smell the festering wounds of frostbitten miners as the thaw sets in, and cringe at the all-consuming, sense-defying, maddening lust for gold that overthrew the hearts and minds of 100,000 ordinary people at the end of the 19th Century. We’ve leaned delightedly into the slang and syntax of the era, we’ve referenced hundreds of photographs and first-hand accounts, we’ve borrowed lives and names and faces, all to build a truly faithful picture of this astonishing time and place...
...and then… into this world of greed, despair and detail, we’re layering a sediment of myths, monsters and horrors. Shadowed forests, scuttling giants and nightmares made flesh.
You know why Weird Westerns so rarely shine? It’s because the Wild West as we imagine it today is already a product of myth and confabulation. You don’t blow minds by taking a fantasy and adding more fantasy. But in the Klondike stampede of 1896-1899 I found a period and a place so elaborately chronicled -- and so genuinely astonishing in its catalogue of human dramas -- that to slide elements of supernature and horror into its substrate felt perfectly additive. Adding the mythic to the painfully real, without robbing either of their power. It works better than I could have dreamed.
I’ve been fascinated by the last great gold rush all my life. The stories of endurance and desperation, the mass hysteria, the casual disregard for life - and all of it dwarfed by the manic, burning, all-consuming lust for a fleeting, forlorn chance at wealth.
This is the perfect time and place to tell stories in which the mythologies and parables of ancient times - all those wonderful cautionary tales about avarice and monsters that slither wherever men’s lusts override their rationality - can be brought beautiful and meaningfully to life.
And then? To underscore it all with its most perfect opposite. The pure, unalloyed and unquenchable love a mother has for her child. That, for me - a recent dad, still trying and failing to grasp the unfathomable depths of love and protectiveness I never knew I had in me - made this a story that couldn’t go untold.
I’ve been a Nathan Gooden geek since I first clapped eyes on Zojaqan back in 2018, and the record-busting Barbaric simply blew my mind further. His style treads that magical line between the real and the heightened -- the line where comics thrive, in my view -- with an acerbic spikiness all of its own. His inks feel like the unlikely offspring of Eddie Campbell circa From Hell and Sergio Toppi -- I can think of no greater compliment -- and in that fusion of the brutally real and the beautifully exotic he is the greatest, nay only, fit for The Rush.