Who doesn’t love a good road trip?
Short or long, road trips are always an adventure. Whether they’re a means to a known and desired location like a relaxing campsite, lodge or the comfort of a family home, or they’re a wayward philosophical or psychological meandering that follows the yellow line to no particular destination at all, you never know what you’ll find.
It’s on road trips that one gets a glimpse, even if fleeting, of an otherwise unseen countryside landscape, the scenic images that make up the backdrop of the country in which we live and the people that exist within those borders. Perhaps more importantly, road trips give us time to reflect on our lives, the current state of our successes and failures, our happiness or sorrow, our loves, wants and our own, personal hauntings.
As enticing a road trip can be, they often come fraught with fictional, figments of the mind, threats…or, sometimes, something altogether otherwise.
We’ve all seen the films: Psycho, Duel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Vanishing, Mad Max, The Cabin In The Woods, House of 1,000 Corpses and Bones And All and we’ve all read the books and comic books: The Road, N0S4A2, The Walking Dead and Preacher. Each of those contributing tales to the pop culture zeitgeist is a warning: bad things can happen on the road.
Today’s release of the first issue of the new monthly series, Phantom Road, continues that horrific, and highly entertaining, trend!
Written and illustrated by award-winning comic book industry luminaries, Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, The Bone Orchard Mythos, Descender, Little Monsters, Maze Book, Sentient) and Gabriel H. Walta (Sentient, The Vision, Hellboy, B.P.R.D.: Old Man Whittler) and published by Image Comics, Phantom Road takes readers on the open highway, full of mystery, dread and monsters!
Phantom Road is the story of Dom, a long-haul trucker who, despite his best attempts, can’t seem to outrun a tragic past. Along his long but altogether normal evening route, he encounters a horrific car crash and Birdie, a survivor who seems to have hallucinated something altogether strange in the moments before the accident. Together, the discover a mysterious artifact amongst the roadside wreckage and are immediately pulled into a journey across a surreal landscape full of bizarre and horrific monsters, both physical and otherwise.
Phantom Road is a supernatural fantasy and a fiendish cross-country road trip through hell on earth. It harkens all of the best on-the-road and grindhouse pop culture you’ve come across before – and takes the genre for a brand-new spin.
Put the pedal to the metal and drive yourself to your local comic book shop today and pick up the harrowing and wholly enthralling, Phantom Road #1!
You can catch a sneak peek of the first few pages of Phantom Road here or check out the comic book’s trailer directly below.
