Broken Frontier

After a seven month hiatus caused by the fall of Speakeasy Comics, Jose L. Torres and Chris DiBari return with the 200-page, eight-issue spanning collected edition of The Hunger.  “While it really hurt us to have to keep our fans waiting, Chris and I have been using the time wisely,” says Torres, adding, “we knew that putting our readership in the position of having to buy the book twice was going to be a little touchy, so we went back and rewrote the entire ending, adding pages to the final product and pushing the story as far as we could.”

In addition to upping the page count and intensity of the story, the creators of The Hunger have also instituted a buy-back program for people who purchased the first five issues only to now have to purchase the trade.  If you purchased the first five issues and the trade, and you feel the trade was not worth the double-dip, you can contact them either through their forum at www.markosia.com or e-mail Torres directly at jingzenwriter@yahoo.com and he will buy the issues from you for the price of the trade.  “That way, the our faithful readers can have the complete first arc without feeling like we, the creators, did not consider them in our decision making process,” added DiBari.  I have to make sure two things are clear here:

(1) The person must have purchased the first five issues to qualify for the refund.

(2) The refund will come from MY pockets, not Markosia (so please do not e-mail them about this)."

The Hunger follows the adventures and misfortunes of a young man named Charlie Lee who, while vacationing in New Orleans is kidnapped, killed and brought back as the zombie slave of some Caribbean gangsters.  As his uncontrollable urges take him down a dark and bloody road, Charlie must evade both the criminals that created him and the police who are desperately looking for a killer who all signs indicate was the first victim.

Randy Lander at The Fourth Rail calls The Hunger “a tale that is part zombie comic, part Tarantino-esque crime story and maybe a little bit of dark humor, set against the backdrop of New Orleans at Mardi Gras.”  He then adds, “Torres knows how to grab the reader from the start, and The Hunger #1 really opens strong. Our lead character is covered in blood, talking about hunger beyond anything anyone has experienced, and then we pan over to see some poor guy nailed to a chair and providing the blood decorating the protagonist. Two pages in, and I'm in "yeah? yeah? what happens next?" mode.”

The Hunger Volume 1 Trade Paperback is solicited in the May Previews on page 327.  The order code is MAY063284.  It will be a 200-page trade containing the first eight issues with an extended ending and covers by Eric Powell, Tony Harris and the Spectrum inducted work of newcomer Tony Shasteen.