In the new comic Horizon, a four-person team attempts to thwart the world-conquering plan of an alien race. The twist in this book from writer Brandon Thomas (whose publication in July, was announced earlier today at the Image Comics Expo)? The aliens are us!

“It’s set on earth in the very near-future,” says Thomas (The Fantastic Four, The Many Adventures of Miranda Mercury). “Earth is essentially dying and this is something that is not known by the general public. But earth has a countdown, time is running out for humanity, and there is a secret program that’s been put in place to find us another planet to colonize. Our main character in Horizon, Zhia Malen, comes from a planet that has been targeted for occupation by earth. So, she has brought a small strike team to our planet to prevent us from conquering her world. The alien invasion story is a very common one, so it occurred to me how more interesting it could actually be if earth was conquering another planet. What if we were the aggressor and how would that play out?”

Thomas is collaborating on the Image/Skybound title (out July 13) with artist Juan Gedeon and colorist Frank Martin. “Juan did a series for Marvel last year called Ghost Racers, which I thought was amazing,” says the writer. “So when my Skybound editor suggested him as the artist for this book, I was jumping up and down. And Frank Martin has colored a lot of big-time books for Marvel, he’s done some Star Wars stuff. He’s also coloring one of my favorite Image titles that’s out right now, it’s a book called East of West, and we were very excited and very honored to get him onboard.”

You can get an exclusive first look at Horizon, below. “The preview pages are just scratching the surface,” says Thomas. “Those particular pages are intentionally not in sequence. The pages that you have are pages 1 and 2 and pages 10 and 11. There’s still a lot of surprises in store!”

Image zoom

Image zoom

Image zoom