Broken Frontier

February sees the release of a new monthly ongoing comic book at Devil’s Due. Like the publisher’s Street Fighter series, it is a licensed property based on a popular CAPCOM video game. Although this particular adaptation doesn’t feature a bunch of weirdos with slick sucker-punch moves, it has one thing in common with Chun-Li, Ryu, Lord Bison & co: there’s plenty of violence and blood involved. With the title of the series being ‘Killer 7’, that wasn’t too hard to figure out.

Killer 7 is written by Arvid Nelson, of Rex Mundi fame (returning soon from Image Comics with Juan E. Ferreyra on art), drawn by Bong Dazo, and produced by Dave Forrest of Kinetic Underground. Nelson stopped by to tell how he got involved in the project. “I met Dave Forrest of Kinetic Underground during a five hour delay on the flight back from the San Diego Comic-Con a few years back,” he sys. “We started talking, and we just kind of hit it off. It turned out we both live in Queens, so we started collaborating. Dave is producing Killer 7. This is the first project of ours that's actually seeing the light of day, but we have a lot of experience working together.”

This new baby from Devil’s Due, aimed at mature readers, centers around a US-based collective of assassins named—you guessed it—Killer 7. Because that doesn’t really say much, Nelson shed a bit more light on the situation: “[The series] is set in the present-day, or in the recent past, but given slightly different historical circumstances. The world is uniting under a global government, air travel and nuclear weapons have been banned, but a series of horrible terrorist attacks threaten the progress. An underground, fascist Japanese political party is connected to the chaos, and a group of assassins called the Killer 7 are called in. The Killer 7 are… unusual. They are seven different people who share the same body and can transform from one person to the next at will.”

People who are familiar with the video game know that Nelson is referring to Harman Smith, a hitman who hosts seven different personalities: Dan, Kevin, Con, Coyote, Mask, Garcian, and… Kaede (if that ain’t taking transsexuality to heart, I don’t know what is!). For those of you losing track, don’t worry. According to Nelson, “It's all part of the story, and everything will be explained!”

‘Together’, the Killer 7 have to prevent the launch of several nuclear missiles that will pulverise the land of the rising sun upon impact. Apparently, that’s the way things go with atomic bombs…

When asked if he’s a fan of the video game, Nelson was as affirmative as ever: “Yes! The game's unique and very interesting. It's clever, dark, violent and funny. Like a lot of Japanese imports, a lot is lost in translation, so the biggest challenge for me was making sense of this amazing, sprawling universe the sick geniuses at CAPCOM had come up with.”

Killer 7 will be released this February from Devil’s Due Publishing. In the meantime, have a look at the first six pages from issue #1 and some other goodies based on the property: 

For more information on Killer 7, visit www.devilsdue.net and www.killer7.com.

(Note: the pages that are displayed above are still being revised, so they might change from the actual pages that end up in the book.)

- Frederik Hautain