We might be living in yet another pandemic year, but it’s also a new golden age for kaiju. From Superman doing battle with giant monsters to titles like Kaiju Score and The Trials of Ultraman, it’s clear that this over-sized genre is having a new heyday. (Maybe because people are grappling with their own monster-sized issues and crises? Who knows!) Now, Vault Comics is getting in on the action with its own kaiju series, We Ride Titans.
The series is the brain-child of writer Tres Dean (For Your Consideration: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Dead Beats) and artist Sebastián Piriz (Canto). It follows Kit Hobbs, the pilot of a giant mech/Titan that guards New Hyperion from nasty kaiju threats. In addition to battling giant foes on a near-constant basis, Hobbs works to keep her family, including a “spiraling brother” and her “powder keg of a father,” from completely falling apart.
In a statement, Dean says he dreamt up the story, which runs across five issues, while riding the Long Island Railroad several years ago.
“Having spent several years in the industry at that point I’d long wondered what my first creator-owned book would end up being. It changed with We Ride Titans. I stopped trying to cater to genre, to trends, and to archetypes and instead built all of those things around themes I wanted (or maybe needed) to work with. The result: a big, bombastic story about mecha and kaiju with all of the questions I had about family, siblings, pain, anger, and the possibility of reconciliation at the core. By the time my train let me off at the Bellmore stop I knew this was the one — and that I’d do whatever it took to make sure that ended up being the case.”
Meanwhile, Piriz says he saw the book’s scope and missions as a bit more straightforward.
“I got be honest, its giant robots vs kaiju. Tres didn’t need to say anything more to have me onboard. But then I read the story treatment, and the scripts… It is a great story that will hit home for most of people. And all this working for one of the best publishers in comics. Working for Vault is in my bucket list since they launched their first books. You can’t ask for much more than this.”
We Ride Titans #1 is due out December 15. In the meantime, check out some art below, including a variant cover by by Vault’s very own artist-in-residence, Joshua Hixson.
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