Vault Comics is going to the gold rush era in 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.
"I've been waiting to tell this story for years," said Spurrier. "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."
"This is the story I've been waiting to tell since I started in comics," said Gooden. "I am a huge western fan. In fact, my first project ever in comics is a self published graphic novel, Dead Eye, is a horror story set in the late 1800's west. One of my favorite comics growing up was the anthology series, Western Tales of Terror. I'm always drawn to the genre, so when I first read the outline for The Rush, I knew I had to be a part of it.
"As we all know, Si is a brilliant writer. I was blown away by the amount of research he had done for this project. I guess that's why he is one of the best. It's a time and place you think you know so well, until you start to dig deeper and realize there are worlds of information to uncover. Also, it's Si Spurrier, horror, and monsters! What more could you want?"
The Rush #1
- Written by Si Spurrier
- Art by Nathan Gooden
- Colors by Addison Duke
- Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
- Design by Tim Daniel
- This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills.
- 1899, Yukon Territory. A frozen frontier, bloodied and bruised by the last great Gold Rush. But in the lawless wastes to the North, something whispers in the hindbrains of men, drawing them to a blighted valley, where giant spidertracks mark the snow and impossible guns roar in the night.
- To Brokehoof, where gold and blood are mined alike. Now, stumbling towards its haunted forests comes a woman gripped not by greed -- but the snarling rage of a mother in search of her child...
- From Si Spurrier (Way of X, Hellblazer) and Nathan Gooden (Barbaric, Dark One) comes THE RUSH, a dark, lyrical delve into the horror and madness of the wild Yukon.
