Oni Press has an ambitious new year planned, launching five new comics as part of the "Oni 2024" line between December and April. The first of these, Invasive, promises to be one of the most unsettling horror comics in recent memory. Even co-creator Cullen Bunn calls it "one of the darkest stories I've written.”
If that has you intrigued, head to the slideshow gallery below for an exclusive preview of Invasive #1, including a new pair of variant covers by Jae Lee:
Invasive is written by Bunn (The Sixth Gun) and drawn by Jesús Hervás (The Empty Man). Here's the official description for the series:
Dr. Carrie Reynolds was a veteran trauma surgeon with a godlike mastery of muscle and bone. But outside the operating room, her rigidly ordered life spiraled into chaos when her daughter, Heather—a recovering plastic surgery addict—suddenly disappeared, only to mysteriously reemerge in a catatonic state, her vocal cords removed . . . the latest in a series of victims all scarred by a battery of brazenly cruel medical procedures that have baffled police and left an alarming number of once-ordinary citizens maimed, mutilated, or dead on arrival.
Because, deep beneath the streets of Carrie’s city, a new kind of underground hospital has just opened its doors . . . and, once inside, there are no rules, no oaths, and no taboos too deep to not to be broken. Together, a new class of surgeon has sworn to pierce the final threshold of accepted medical orthodoxy one incision at a time.
The scalpel is their tool. The alleys are their operating theater. Murder is their medicine. And only Carrie can stop what they're planning next...
"Invasive is one of the darkest stories I’ve written. And I’ve written some dark stories!" Bunn tells IGN. "There were plenty of times while scripting this that I wondered, 'Am I going too far?' The answer, as you can imagine, was 'Yes!' But that didn’t stop me."
"From the moment we laid eyes on what Cullen and Jesús were planning with Invasive, we knew it was a book we had to publish," adds Oni Press Publisher Hunter Gorrinson. "Obviously, it has a great hook for a stylishly gory horror comic (murder surgeons, c'mon!) but, even better, it has a fascinating, fully realized cast of wounded characters – literally and figuratively – orbiting around a huge, suspense-driven mystery at its core. Even for such accomplished creators with impressive bodies of work behind them, this series is an achievement that just sucks readers in. Horror comics just leveled up – read it or beware!"
Invasive #1 is priced at $4.99 and will be released on December 6, 2023.
For more on what's coming in the world of comics, check out our exclusive preview of Hellboy Winter Special: The Yule Cat and see the biggest new comic books of November 2023.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
