Afterlift: Chip Zdarsky Releases Best Comic Book Trailer Ever

With a menagerie of new comic book titles arriving in stores each week, titles have to go out of their way to capture an audience’s attention. In the case of Afterlift, the Eisner-winning Comixology Originals comic that arrives in print this week thanks to Dark Horse Comics, that meant getting pretty creative. On Tuesday, Afterlift writer Chip Zdarsky took to Twitter to share his own “book trailer” for the physical release, and the end result – which you can check out below – needs to be seen to be believed.

The trailer combines everything from the traditional “In a world…” introduction to the Star Wars title scroll to a needle drop involving Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life”. By the time the trailer gets to the Dark Horse logo, its hilarity is taken to a whole new direction.

Written by Zdarsky with art by Jason Loo, Afterlift is a fast-paced story about car chases, demon bounty hunters, and figuring out your place in this world and the next. Janice Chen recently quit her day job in finance and signs up to be a driver on a ride-sharing app. She has enough to deal with, from annoying passengers to overbearing parents. But what was at first a mundane yet enjoyable way to pass the time takes a terrible turn when she picks up a pair of mysterious passengers who are pursued by otherworldly forces, Janice realizes that her already-terrible day might be headed straight to hell.

“I think for “afterlife” stories, the two that I look to the most are Sandman and The Good Place,” Zdarsky explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last year. “Sandman had a really shifting, story-based afterlife feeling to it, which we lean on here to explore personal religions co-existing. But The Good Place is an inspiration in how it uses the afterlife to prompt personal growth beyond death, which is the character journey for our two leads, Janice, and her “fare,” Suzanna. Death isn’t the end of growth. Our big addition to the genre is the action element of it. A car chase through the afterlife, like a hellish Fast and the Furious. Though I suspect all the characters in the Fast and the Furious movies are already dead considering the supernatural things their cars do.”

What do you think of the book trailer for Afterlift? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Afterlift will be available in comic book shops beginning this Wednesday, February 3rd.