Press Release
Mark Kidwell, Jeff Zornow, and Jay Fotos, the team behind the multiple Horror Comic and Ghastly Award-winning ‘68: JUNGLE JIM bring new terrors to the Vietnam War in ‘68: RULE OF WAR #1, the first in a four-issue miniseries sure to delight zombie enthusiasts.
In a doom-shadowed Cambodia infested with the living dead, CIA Special Agent Declan Rule and his canine companion Nero stalk a human monster, a neurosurgeon bent on carrying out grisly experiments that turn P.O.W.s into vicious instruments of war.
In ’68: RULE OF WAR Kidwell focuses on the horrifying capabilities of humans, rather than just zombies alone. “Readers will see how a human imagination, backed up by years of medical and scientific education, can take a threat like a shambling, cannibalistic demon and make it worse by wiring it to a radio transmitter frequency, packing it with high explosives and aiming it at an unsuspecting opposition,” said Kidwell. “Also, with the dead, surgical application and augmentation could be performed without boundaries. The threat of ‘losing’ a patient due to lab table trauma is zero as long as you don’t destroy the brain. Think Frankenstein on steroids with the bedside manner of Joseph Stalin and you’re getting warm.”
In Vietnam, Private Kuen Yam and his ragtag band of survivors battle their way across a murderous no-man’s-land in a desperate search for a ticket to the skies. The war is over, but the battle for humanity’s survival has just begun.
“The concept of ’68 owes its roots to the fact that George Romero and John Russo unleashed their original vision of the American flesh-eating undead in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead,” explained Kidwell. “If you take that birthdate as gospel in the creation of the zombie sub-genre, it’s a no-brainer that the conflict in Southeast Asia would have become an instant, overnight hell teeming with hungry ghouls and unburied war dead. The goal then, was to introduce the supernatural horror of the zombie plague into the equation already established by the horrors of an out-of-control war and let the readers decide which is worse.”
‘68: RULE OF WAR #1 is the first in a four-issue miniseries, arrives in stores on 4/2, and will be available for $3.99.
‘68: RULE OF WAR #1 with Cover A by Nat Jones can be pre-ordered using Diamond Code FEB140498. Cover B, with art by Clayton Crain, can be pre-ordered using Diamond Code FEB140499. And Cover C, which is a blank sketch variant, can be pre-ordered using Diamond Code FEB140500.
ABOUT IMAGE COMICS
Image Comics is a comic book and graphic novel publisher founded in 1992 by a collective of best-selling artists. Image has since gone on to become one of the largest comics publishers in the United States. Image currently has five partners: Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri and Jim Valentino. It consists of five major houses: Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow Productions, Shadowline, Skybound and Image Central. Image publishes comics and graphic novels in nearly every genre, sub-genre, and style imaginable. It offers science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, crime fiction, historical fiction, humor and more by the finest artists and writers working in the medium today. For more information, visit www.imagecomics.com.
