“Want to get away from it all? You can’t do better than a point in the Pacific Ocean popularly known as ‘Point Nemo,'” reads the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s official website for the colloquially-named location that is the farthest place on Earth you can be from land. But what secrets lie at that spot? Writer Mark Sable artist Antonio Locatelli, colorist Juancho!, and letterer Rob Steen are about to surface that mystery in a new series, Where Starships Go to Die, which imagines the remote spot as a dumping ground for out-of-commission space cruisers. The first issue of the series will feature a main cover by Jeremy Haun & Matt Milla, as well as an incentive variant cover by Maan House.
Here’s how AfterShock Comics describes Where Starships Go to Die:
Point Nemo – the farthest oceanic point on earth from any landmass. A spacecraft graveyard where rockets and satellites can be safely ditched on the ocean floor. In a near future ravaged by climate change, an African astronaut teams with an Indian shipping magnate to mount a dangerous salvage mission to recover the wreck of humanity’s first interstellar starship. But what they find is beyond their worst nightmares.
Where Starships Go to Die is the latest AfterShock work for writer Mark Sable, whose previous credits for the publisher include Miskatonic and Godkillers: War on Terror. It’s Sable’s first collaboration with artist Alberto Locatelli, and Locatelli’s first work for AfterShock.
In a statement announcing the new series, Sable described the fictional and real-world inspirations for Where Starships Go to Die:
“Movies like James Cameron’s The Abyss, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Ridley Scott’s Alien and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar were all influential in establishing the tone we’re going for. But I was also inspired by the real-life Point Nemo, and the idea of “berserker probes” – theoretical, self-replicating spacecraft created by alien civilizations to find and wipe out any life they consider a threat. They’ve been offered as a very scary answer to the Fermi Paradox, the question of why we haven’t encountered intelligent life – because berserker probes have killed them all…and we’re next.”
Check out Maan House’s variant cover, as well as an unlettered five-page preview of the first issue of the series, below. Where Starships Go to Die #1 is set to arrive in stores and digitally on Wednesday, June 8th.
