Vault Announces PULP & PAINT, a New Line of Variant Covers for 2020

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Vault Comics is thrilled to announce PULP & PAINT, a new line of variant covers by Tim Daniel and Nathan Gooden inspired by the aesthetics of the pulp era of novels and magazines.

Following in the footsteps of 2018’s Women In Front and 2019’s Vault Vintage variant cover initiatives, PULP & PAINT draws from the very origins of genre fiction, harkening back to an age when pulp magazines and novels were commonly fronted by exquisitely painted covers.

“There’s been a resurgence of interest in richly rendered imagery stoked by alternative movie posters from Mondo and Bottleneck, publishers like Hard Case Crime, or deep dive studies of the form such as Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix,” says Tim Daniel, EVP Branding and Design. “Readers and collectors have shown a real desire for something authentic and striking in the age of digital perfection.”

“Over the course of the last year, artist Nathan Gooden has demonstrated an incredible versatility using a variety of traditional and digital techniques to homage some of our industry’s greatest legends and their respective landmark works,” continues Daniel. “His background in painting strongly evokes the Pulp era. After a year of tribute covers, Vault Editor-In-Chief Adrian Wassel was eager for us to clear our throats and really let readers see what we’re capable of outside those parameters.”

“Once Adrian suggested PULP & PAINT, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get back to my roots,” Nathan Gooden adds. “My love for Sci-Fi & Fantasy can be traced back to one moment: the time I held my first Frank Frazetta cover. Our Vault Vintage initiative started us down this road, but PULP & PAINT gives me and Tim the chance to fully explore what inspired our careers in comics.”

PULP & PAINT debuts with the return of Vagrant Queen in January, 2020. Every new first issue from Vault in 2020 will ship with it’s own unique PULP & PAINT variant.

The first two PULP & PAINT covers can be seen below, one of which is a tease of an unannounced Vault series that will debut in February 2020.

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Review: Ghosted in LA #6

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In the earliest issues of GHOSTED IN LA (Boom! Box), the story at times felt like it was haunting itself. Daphne, a rising first-year college student, leaves her quiet town of Missoula, Montana to attend school in Los Angeles. Her bestie, Kristi sends her off with a terrible tongue lashing. She accuses Daphne of only going to LA in order to follow her boyfriend Ronnie. Soon after Daphne follows Ronnie to LA, Ronnie shares with her that he is gay. Ronnie’s story is backgrounded early on, but at times in the first few issues it feels like his is the more important or significant story of GHOSTED IN LA. At the start of this series it seems like Ronnie is a plot device to get Daphne out to LA and to ghost her there. But by the time we arrive at issue #6 it is clear that Ronnie is also a protagonist of the story and his life in LA is just as important to this series as Daphne’s is.

The only way that Daphne is able to cope with her standoffish roommate and the fact that her boyfriend is not really her boyfriend anymore is to make new friends. And as luck would have it, she happens upon a classic LA housing complex inhabited by the ghostly undead. Sina Grace’s script is more complex than it seems. And Siobhan Keenan’s artwork is similarly fun and breezy until it is dark and gothic. Somehow GHOSTED IN LA captures the sunny brightness of southern California and the grimy darkness of a seedy LA on a smoggy night. The tensions between the light and the dark are always taut in this series. The contrast reflects the tensions in the relationships of the story. Daphne and Kristi, Daphne and Ronnie, or Daphne and her college roommate. None of these relationships are working. In each relationship the clash or the conflict dominates each interaction.

But GHOSTED IN LA #6 has a different feel from the first few issues. The human relationships are starting to take a backseat and a more compelling view of this series is emerging in the developing relationships between humans and specters/ghosts. The ghosts were already more interesting characters than the humans in this story. They have back stories that reach back into history and wrestle with issues of intimate relationships in different eras and with different sets of rules. They also pose an impossible question: what if our most compelling intimate relationships are with ephemeral memories of a bygone past? Maybe we all need to be ghosted.

The relationship between Daphne and Zola – a rock star who Daphne idolized before she became a ghost – is far more interesting and intimate than any other relationship that Daphne has had up to this point. The same might be said for Ronnie’s relationship with Bernard, a ghost who live a closeted life and now sees some of his missed aspirations in (and through) the life of Ronnie. Somehow the human relationships in GHOSTED IN LA are better when the humans are relating to ghosts. In this world, human intimacy is stymied by humans. But at least there are a few ghosts hanging around to make life more intimate and more interesting.

SCORE: 4/5

(W) Sina Grace (A/CA) Siobhan Keenan

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