What happens after we die? Vault Comics is ready to drop their version of the afterlife in End After End. The publisher has announced the new fantasy series co-written by Tim Daniel and David Andry, calling it “Willow meets Saving Private Ryan,” or “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty meets Lord of the Rings.” Art for the series is by Sunando C, colors are from Kurt Michael Russell, and letters are by Jim Campbell. Daniel is also on designs and fans can look for a variant cover by Liana Kangas.
Read the synopsis here:
“Life is nothing if not a series of endings. School. Jobs. Friendships. Love. Until THE end.
Walter Willem’s end was fast and unexpected. His was an unremarkable life. So, how is it that his story continues as cannon fodder in an endless war waged against an insatiable darkness hellbent on consuming all of existence? And is Walter right in believing he’s arrived in the midst of this titanic battle as the one destined to finally end it? That’s the tale of the End After End.”
Andry said in a statement:
“The story behind the End After End is really the story of how Tim Daniel saved me.
We were both feeling burned out before we started to co-write. As the last issues of Resonant were hitting the stands, I started to get pretty discouraged about the comic industry. We were several months into the pandemic and I was back to writing things that would probably never see the light of day. I considered quitting several times. It was at this moment that Tim called up and decided it was time for us to work together.
Tim and I have been friends for years, and he has always been supportive of my writing career, often giving me feedback on scripts and advice on the industry itself. Over the years, we toyed with the idea of working on something together, but it had never come to fruition. Until now.
Tim said he was open to writing anything. Anything but fantasy.
“Well…”, I said, “I’ve got this fantasy idea”.
This idea had been bouncing around in my head for a while.
“A regular person, at the moment of their death, gets transported into a fantasy world and conscripted into a never-ending war against evil.”
But that was it, I hadn’t been able to crack the story any further than that. After about five hours on the phone, we had the bones of the whole series laid out.
Tim’s dislike of certain aspects of fantasy really helped to shape End After End. There were no fancy wizards, no complicated histories, and no confusing rules governing magic. This was fantasy at the ground level. A war story from the view of a footsoldier. A grunt in the mud.
Walt, our main protagonist, wants to make a difference, to be a hero, to be remembered. He didn’t get the chance to do so in the real world, but maybe he can in the End After End? Walt is dumped right into the middle of an endless war, a footsoldier with no special skills or abilities. A cog in a great, grinding wheel. What kind of difference can this type of man make?
Tim and I are really channeling ourselves through Walt, our feelings of struggling against impossible odds, minor players in the grand scheme of things, just trying to make a difference in this world. We both want to make our mark on the industry. Not necessarily with sales or awards, but by impacting people with our stories.
Walt is us and we are Walt.”
Daniel added:
“Like many people over the past eighteen months, I’ll freely admit that I ran aground–drained and unfocused by everything swirling around (us all), and last March, I was thoroughly, creatively exhausted. I found myself casting about for a source of inspiration. I discovered it was standing right in front of me for nearly a decade in the person of my good friend and Resonant writer David ‘DB’ Andry.
All it took was one call and five hours later we had mapped out the entirety of a war-fantasy tale that was then entitled, At The Moment of Your Death. Strangely enough, a couple of weeks into the project, my eight-year-old daughter Olivia handed me a sketch, and at the top of the page she’d written End After End…now look, the universe can point you in a direction, and all you really must do is open yourself up to the possibilities…
The End After End is just that, and Walt Willem has a second chance to open himself up to what he can be and not what he once was nor what he thinks he should be–and how many of us have the endurance to push through the doorway of life’s many endings to discover who we really are and not allow ourselves to be defined by them?
I still think we should do all that we can to hold tight to that hopefulness and I’d like to think both DB and I will keep pushing those doorways open, and now we’d like you to come along with us into the End After End.”
Sunando said:
“When Tim and I first started talking about what I wanted to do at Vault, I told him that I really wanted to work on something with a lot of world-building and design, something huge and epic in scale and with END AFTER END, DB, and Tim really delivered. I couldn’t be more excited about all the demands of this story, creating the titular End after End from the ground up and while we’re still working on the art for the first issue, there are things in the scripts for issues 2, 3, 4, 5 and beyond that, I can’t wait to get to.”
End After End is slated to debut in December 2021.
