Vault Comics has announced a new science fiction series, No One’s Rose, hitting stores in March 2020, adding yet another intricate, fascinating world to the publisher’s lineup. Written by Zac Thompson and Emily Horn, the new series features art by Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque. Raúl Angulo is set for colors and Tim Daniel is on designs.
Here is a synopsis of the upcoming comic:
Centuries after the fall of the Anthropocene, the last vestiges of human civilization are housed in a massive domed city powered by renewable energy, known as The Green Zone. Inside lives teenager Tenn Gavrilo, a brilliant bio-engineer who could rebuild the planet. But there’s one problem: her resentful brother Seren is eager to dismantle the precarious utopia.
A gorgeous and green solar-punk world filled with strange biotechnology, harsh superstorms, and divisive ideologies-ideologies that will tear Tenn and Seren down to their roots as they fight for a better Earth.
Horn said in a statement:
I have had a ridiculous amount of fun building the world in No One’s Rose. Sustainability is a hugely important part of how I try to live my life, so it’s really exciting to work together with Zac, who has a brilliant imagination, to build a world where that’s the norm. The Green Zone is a domed city that is thriving in a post climate change ravaged world. The technology in the dome is completely sustainable, so building the world has had its own challenges. For instance, how do you feed a city of 30,000 people without large stretches of agricultural land? A lot of this story is Zac and I trying to imagine how this world would actually work. In the dome there are vertical gardens climbing buildings, a giant oxygenating tree, and buildings that live amid the forested lower level of the dome as if they sprang up as part of the natural world. We’ve been writing this story for about three years but there were points where one of us would turn to the other and go, wait, how is that supposed to work?
Alberto Alburquerque has done an incredible job of bringing this world and its characters to life which has honestly made it better than I ever imagined. I’m constantly blown away by his work. He’s such a stellar artist and Zac and I both feel so fortunate to have him on the book. Raul Angulo’s coloring is gorgeous in this super-colorful and verdant world.
A huge inspiration for this book was when I started reading the news around climate change and what struck me first was how so often the language around it was often about obliteration, not about adaptation. Adaptation to climate change is learning to live and thrive in situations that our ancestors were never challenged to do, at least not on a global scale. It feels like, on the whole, the media brings up the topic of climate change as if it were the apocalypse, that no one will be left behind if climate catastrophe strikes. The reality, I think, is that our children and our children’s children will be learning to adapt to a different world. The story of humanity is the story of perseverance through nearly impossible odds, and there is a lot of encouraging science around adaptation. The fun part about this story is that we get to incorporate all these really interesting ideas around green technologies. There’s so much news about green energy technologies and carbon capture technologies, as well as science on how to leverage the already amazing qualities of the environment to self-clean the ecosystem. Oysters are incredibly good at filtering water, for instance, and mushrooms and mycelium have incredible carbon capturing properties. No One’s Rose is the story of how people live, survive and even thrive on Earth after runaway, catastrophic climate change.
I am incredibly grateful that Vault, especially editor Adrian Wassel, has been so supportive with this world. Climate change is a difficult topic to tackle but it’s so important that we have a conversation about adaptation and what that might look like in the future.
Thompson added:
The planet’s on fire. And the people with the power to change it are doing nothing.
We’re living through a historic era. One of catastrophic climate change. A topic so insanely large and nebulous that many people don’t know how to fight it or relate to it. The climate crisis has become such a massively distributed thing that we can only be aware of small pieces of it at a time.
In 1972, John Brunner’s dystopian novel The Sheep Look Up seemed like a crazy alternate future. One filled with civil unrest, ineffective government services, unclean air, poisoned water, and rising global temperatures. This work of fiction is now our uncanny reality. No One’s Rose is a story born of that uncanny reality. It’s a book about our ongoing climate crisis. One that looks it in the eye and purports something better can come in the wake of catastrophic climate change.
Emily and I met three years ago and have been building No One’s Rose since the week we met. We instantly connected over our love for the environment and our existential dread about the ensuing climate crisis. We both felt so hopeless about the situation in front of us. And even with making small sustainable changes – the dread didn’t go away. So we set out to create a book about hope. Giving readers hope that a better world is possible. Showing a different way of life. Showing a world where we finally get it right and the cost associated with that. But it’s not just about one way of thinking…
…we want to expose readers to different philosophies of thought regarding environmentalism. They’ll learn about the incredible power of trees and their unique ability to rebuild the planet thanks to inspiration from Pete Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. The stunning work of philosopher and eco-thinker Timothy Morton has influenced our interpretation of global warming. His cutting edge work exists on the forefront of eco thought, challenging the norms and pushing for a radical and immediate change in the way we view our “non-human” companions on Earth.
We feel so incredibly fortunate that the team at Vault feels as passionately about this story as we do. Our editor, Adrian Wassel completely understood where we were coming from right from the get go and has been such an incredible champion of this story. He’s been instrumental in building this world with us. We’ve got a killer designer with Tim Daniel, who just makes this book sing.
On top of that, we’ve got Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque on art and he’s just a force to be reckoned with.
Artist Alburquerque shared:
About a year ago, I got the chance to work with Zac for the first time on a Spider-Geddon issue for Marvel Comics. He and Lonnie Nadler signed the script. They had me at “panel 1”. The way they mixed action with real emotions and references to anime and manga captivated me from the start. On top of that, I got to meet both of them shortly after at the New York Comic Con, when they came to my table totally unexpected. We chatted a little bit about how fun it had been working together and mentioned that we needed to do it again soon.
Emily and he had this idea about two brothers living in a bubble and that bubble was about to explode. Everything from the human aspect, to the climate change twist, to the design challenge got me hooked.
Obviously, I got on board and together, Emily, Zac and I embarked on the trip of creating this world. It was a tough task on its own but when they told me that it was a story they had been developing for several years, well, it added some extra pressure, truth be told. They told me their ideas about the characters, what they imagined they’d look like, how they’d move in that future world, how that world had evolved, the role that nature played in it, etc. -and it sounded great!- But not easy to depict on paper. I rolled up my sleeves and got busy with the character design of the protagonists. It took me a while to find the look I wanted to give them but I drew a couple of ideas that I kind of liked and went for it. Fortunately, both Emily and Zac liked them right away too and off we went!
After locking down the characters’ looks, pages weren’t any easier but we did our best. Raúl completes the team brilliantly and his colors are bringing even more life to my lines making them better. The Vault Comics editors and designers are doing a fantastic job at rounding up even the smallest details, to try and make the best story we can make. And it’s a good one. A story with weight, and a ton of themes that make you think but that also entertains you.
No One’s Rose is set to release in March. The Beat received an exclusive look at some concept art and the covers. Get a sneak peek below.
