Environmentalists -- and disaster movies -- have long been warning the public about the dangers of humankind's impact on the Earth, and in The Massive, the upcoming Dark Horse comic by Brian Wood and Kristan Donaldson (DMZ), those fears have become a terrible reality. Originally announced as a three-part arc in Dark Horse Presents, Dark Horse has now extended the book to an ongoing series that imagines the world in the aftermath of a profound environmental collapse from the perspective of an environmentalist. As the tagline for the book asks, "What does it mean to be an environmentalist after the world's already ended?" What's the point of being right, after all, if you're too late?Whatever the ecological disaster entails has something to do with the sea and global warming, and has a catastrophic affect not only on coastal cities everywhere but also the ecological balance of the world. The book follows Callum Israel, the captain of a ship of environmentalists (a la Greenpeace) who are sailing the oceans of the world in search for their sister ship Massive, and trying to make sense of their world now that it has collapsed around them.

As Wood told CBR in July:

The Massive is one of several story ideas I came up with that I refer to as "post-crash." In each case, that means something a little different -- an economic crash, and environmental crash, a breakdown of society, a man-made disaster of some kind. Basically, a disaster story that starts after the disaster has already come and gone... I thought it was interesting to write about activists and environmentalists who have formed that entire identity around efforts to save the world, and then finding out they utterly and completely failed. Where do you go from there? Talk about a massive (pun!) identity crises. And these are not necessarily tree hugger types, these characters, and this story is not something that can be categorized as some lefty fearmongering... There's actually very little partisan politics in the story concepts I wrote for The Massive. In a way, you can call it post-politics as well as post-crash.



The first installment of the The Massive prequels debuts in Dark Horse Presents #8 this January, and the ongoing series is slated to begin in June 2012.


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