Warning! This story contains some graphic images!
Vinyl is an upcoming mini-series from Image Comics featuring comedy and horror as well as reuniting writer Doug Wagner and artist Daniel Hillyard. Wagner and Hillyard previously worked on the five-issue Image mini-series Plastique. Now, they’re getting six issues to write about psychopaths once again.
Plastic was a mini-series about a retired serial killer whose love of his life is kidnapped. The twist is that the love of his life is a sex doll. It was written by Wagner and drawn by Hillyard as well as Laura Martin. Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead praised the book by saying “This is the weirdest s**t I’ve ever read. I love it!” Vinyl promises its own twists and brings an Eisner-winning colorist along for the ride this time around. Wagner recently Kickstarter his spy thriller Yuma, which was a Scott Pilgrim meets Kingsmen type of graphic novel.
Promoted as a cross between Dexter and Nailbiter on the official Image Comics website, Vinyl is a mish-mash of comedy and horror about Walter, whose best friend gets captured by a cult of female sunflower farmers. To complicate matters further, his best friend is an FBI agent whose job is to capture Walter. Now, Walter must traverse a labyrinth of monsters, who may or may not be more horrific than his. Hopefully, the ending of this mini-series is more fondly remembered than the Dexter finale.
In addition to writer Wagner and artist Hillyard, Eisner-winner Dave Stewart, whose colors have graced the pages of the Rorschach limited series, will be the colorist for this mini-series. According to Wagner, the reason Vinyl came to fruition is because of the artist. “This is all Daniel Hillyard’s fault,” Wagner claimed in the press release. “He asked if I thought we could create a story about serial killers, inhuman monsters, and a cult of sunflower farmers all trapped together inside an underground bunker. I mean, you have to do that, right?” There will be two covers offered for the first issue, both created by Hillyard and Stewart.
Four preview pages were revealed by Image Comics, and they show a pretty violent start to the series, beginning in the middle of some bloody tension before jumping back two weeks to get even more bloody. Vinyl clearly isn’t going to shy away from blood, and Walter seems to have a particular fixation with music that appears to snap him into his killer mode, which has him sporting a teddy bear mask that’s featured on Cover B. Vinyl seems to be giving us a multi-faceted killer with plenty of quirks right off the bat (definite Dexter and Nailbiter vibes there), and it’s not wasting any time getting us right into the action. Readers will have to wait and see though if there’s more than just a bloodbath waiting for them when Vinyl butchers its way into comic book stores on June 23, 2021.
