Visual artist Alexandra Grant is teaming up with writer Matt Kindt, artist Natacha Bustos, and letterer Sophia Hilmes on her first comic book, Nano. A three-part sci-fi action series debuting from Dark Horse this summer, Nano follows a resistance fighter infiltrating the titular mega-city, run by the evil Nanocorp. However, while her partner is tasked with infiltrating a secret research facility, she must play a more mundane role: posing as his wife, and a PE teacher.
Sana is a badass operative of the underground organization the Order. She and her longtime comrade, Lukas, have been assigned to Nano, a mega-city run on prison labor and roiling from blackouts. While Lukas is tasked with infiltrating Nanocorp’s secretive research facility, Sana’s mission is something she’s never trained for: playing the doting wife of Lukas’s cover. In her guise as a middle-school PE teacher, she’s forced to cool her jets and teach eighth graders stretching while Lukas puts himself in danger. But when the signs are unmistakable and Lukas’s mission is clearly going sideways, Sana can no longer sit on the bench.
Grant, 52 states, “Nano is a story that I’ve been daydreaming about for over twenty years — of two worlds clashing together — that of science and technology and that of magic and nature. I can’t thank Matt enough for helping me tell the story, and for Natacha and her vivid drawing and color work in bringing Sana and the whole of Nano to life. It feels like a particularly poignant time for Sana to join the world — a heroine whose name means healing in Spanish — to lead a group of women, girls, and animals, to question and kick ass against a complicated tech world that keeps all people, especially men, imprisoned and very, very small.”
In a People magazine exclusive, Grant elaborates the series originated as a book she wrote, and rediscovered while battling COVID-19. “I got super sick, I had super COVID and was testing positive for 16 days,” she says. “I mean I was hallucinating. By day six, I was like, what am I going to do? I couldn’t leave the room. So I went into my computer, and I found my novel from 20 years before, and I rewrote it, but I rewrote it in my COVID fever dream stage.”
Afterwards, she approached Kindt, who “had been in our home a lot,” working with her partner Keanu Reeves on the BOOM! Studios series BRZRKR. After Kindt struck up a deal with Dark Horse, the pair selected Bustos (who is, incidentally, Spanish) as the book’s artist, as the initial list of suggestions were all white men, and Grant wanted a woman instead. “Natacha had never been given a comic book to do from start to finish… and she’s completely exceptional,” she says. “She took the words and imagined and embodied them perfectly.”
Bustos added on Bluesky, “I’ve been keeping this under wraps for almost a year, so it feels amazing to finally share it with you all.” Kindt also says, “This started as literal fever dream that Alexandra had and was sharing with me. It was so vivid and intricate I was desperate to see it come to life. It has such big and wild ideas that it seemed perfectly suited to comics and I’m honored to be a part of it.”
Nano will begin on July 29, with each issue retailing at 54 pages for $8.99. Barring any more surprises, it will mark the last series from Kindt’s imprint Flux House at Dark Horse, following his move to Oni Press last year, with the new Mind MGMT series set to kick off there on June 24. In the meantime, Bustos’s first new creator-owned series, Skate Ali, will debut from Dark Horse on June 10. You can get more insight from Grant until then at People magazine.
