Exclusive Preview: Legend Shows Our Pets Bite Back Against the Apocalypse

May officially marks National Pet Month, 31 days to give thanks to the four-legged family members whose barks, mews, squaks and chitters enchant our lives, even while leaving our furniture doused in urine and bite marks. Novelist Samuel Sattin and illustrator Chris Koehler are also taking the time to honor our pets by casting man’s best friend in a harrowing, imaginative new comic from Z2 called Legend, whose first chapter debuts this Wednesday.

Channeled through sepia-tinged portraits of post-apocalyptic decay, Legend follows a pack of dogs thriving in a husk of a city without a human to be found. Instituting their own society and leadership structure, the pack deals with the fallout of a confrontation between their alpha, Ransom, and a hellish creature described as “Just teeth. And eyes. And cold.”

As he did in his novels—the superhero homage The League of Somebodies and the quirky horror of The Silent End—Sattin plays inventively with genre, plying anthropomorphic animals with survivalist fantasy. Koehler’s illustrations inject the most noble and amiable qualities of canines onto the page, cast with immaculate shading and detail recalling Jae Lee and Charles Burns. Legend is poised to join the company of such lauded animal epics as The Plague Dogs, Watership Down and Pride of Baghdad with its own distinct tone. Check out Paste’s exclusive preview below.

Legend #1 Promotional Cover by Chris Koehler