Fantasy Book Critic: PRESS RELEASE: Radical Comics Presents Steve Pugh and Warren Ellis’ “Hotwire”

Ghosts. The cities of the future have grown ankle-deep in them as they graze off the electromagnetic waste of a billion wireless Internet connections. Most can only drift, witless and lost. Rarely, though, something comes through with enough marbles to cause real trouble.

And that's where Alice Hotwire, Detective Exorcist, comes in…

Radical Publishing proudly presents its newest title for February 2009, “Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead”. Written and illustrated by Steve Pugh (Animal Man, Saint of Killers), based on an original story by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Crooked Little Vein), the four-issue mini-series takes place in a near-future when ghosts, or “blue lights”, roam the city streets. Most remain harmless . . . until a break-in at London's Maximum Security Necropolis triggers a surge of violent, brutal hauntings.

Enter Alice Hotwire, the local police force's resident Detective Exorcist—a job her fellow officers hate her for. It's a responsibility she doesn't want, in a world she doesn't understand, but she may be the only one who can save them all from ectoplasmic catastrophe.

“When our Editor-in-Chief Dave Elliott brought the project to me, I knew I wanted this to be part of Radical’s library,” said President and Publisher Barry Levine. “Steve Pugh’s artwork is incredible, and the Alice character is equal parts beautiful and scrappy. The story itself is the perfect blend of supernatural, science fiction and adventure. I see this as one of our biggest new titles of 2009.”

The series has been a major project for Pugh as well, after years of development and collaboration with longtime colleague Warren Ellis.

“It’s been an enormous project, but I’ve been determined to get Alice into print for years, and I’m actually pleased it’s taken this long, because artistically, I think I’m at the top of my game,” Pugh said. “It's only through utter arrogance and ridiculous self-belief that I could rewrite a story by one of the most famous comic writers in mainstream publication.”

Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #1 appears in the December 2008 Diamond Previews catalog, to ship February 2009. The first issue hits the stands with four covers, including art by Pugh, Alan Brooks (see bottom), Stjepan Sejic (see inset) and a limited edition variant from Luis Royo (see below), offered as a 1:10 incentive.