PRESS RELEASE
Unlikely Heroes Studios, publishers of the hit indie comics series Super!, announces the electronic release of the first issue in a new series. The Surgeon is a uniquely American postapocalyptic Western built around the struggle of a traveling physician who has sworn to “first do no harm,” but must kill for survival. “Chapter One, Turtle Island” follows Doctor Jenny Hanover as she answers a call for a frontier physician — and finds much more than she bargained for.
The Surgeon is written by John Pence (The Ballad of Brighid of Atlanta, 2015; “Bread and Circuses,” 2016) and will continue for four more chapters. “I’ve been psyched to work with the Unlikely Heroes team for years,” Pence says, “and finally the stars aligned where we all both had time and resources to commit to this project.” Pence’s writing career started in the early 2000s with literary fiction, but in recent years he has focused on the comics medium.
“I’ve always preferred to read comics over prose, ever since I was a kid.” He says, “The medium is great because I can still tell serious stories with heart and grit, I can still make people think, but now I get to work with a great art team, and everybody brings something skillful and cool to the project. Zack (Dolan)’s pencils capture every nuance of mood, and they’ve got fantastic weight and motion. Laurie (Foster)’s inks find the details and shadows perfectly, and Eve (Orozco)’s colors make rain, fire, heat, and blood so real you can almost feel them. Erek (Foster) and I worked together to come up with a lettering scheme that’s inspired by French BDs that inspired me, but is also still American. With art of this quality, it’s not just a story in pictures. It’s way bigger than the sum of its parts. ”
“Adding The Surgeon is just the beginning of a pretty serious expansion for us,” says Unlikely Heroes publisher, Laurie Foster. “We’re currently working on big sci-fi and fantasy story lines, and we’re going to continue expanding Super! and The Surgeon to keep our current fans happy while we find more.”
The Surgeon, “Chapter One: Turtle Island” will be available on Comixology, Amazon Kindle, and Patreon, and UHS is currently running a Kickstarter to finance a print run — check it out at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/uhstudios/the-surgeon.
