The COVID-19 pandemic has made a major impact on the comic book industry, with statewide and citywide quarantines causing stores to close and distribution channels to change. Publishers have been taking different steps to help ensure readers get their books, and it looks like Impact Theory is bringing a new approach to that situation. Earlier this week, the publisher announced that it will be giving away 1,000 free bundles of their two most popular titles — Neon Future and Hexagon. The bundle is currently available on their website, and will only set readers back a few dollars for shipping.
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Neon Future was first released in March of 2019, and is a collaboration with iconic musician and DJ Steve Aoki. In a future where technology is illegal, a war is brewing between the Augmented, who have chosen to integrate technology into their bodies, and the Authentic, who have not. The resistance movement, Neon Future, strives to bring peace by showing the world a brighter future in harmony with technology. But when Authentic hero and TV Star Clay Campbell dies unexpectedly, Neon Future’s mysterious leader Kita Sovee (inspired by Steve Aoki) is forced to decide whether to use his latest technological innovation to bring Clay back from the dead. This choice threatens to tip the uneasy balance between the government and the techno-class into an all-out civil war.
Hexagon released its debut issue last month, bringing to life a story from world-famous DJ Don Diablo. Set in the 1980s, the five-issue miniseries follows a young boy named Don, who wants nothing more than to defeat the popular and seemingly-unbeatable arcade game, Crucible. Through a series of events, he manages to do just that — which unintentionally catches the attention of a group of invading space aliens. Suddenly, Don is thrown into a years-long intergalactic battle, which he doesn’t necessarily know how to handle.
“You’re going to take a kid who’s a normal kid, but he really finds out that he’s not as normal as he thought,” Impact Theory founder Tom Bilyeu told ComicBook.com earlier this year. “But nothing comes easy to him. Is he going to be willing to put in the work to step outside of his comfort zone and have these credible stakes? Which is where we take it. So issue #1 is a small family drama. But by issue two, you’re in outer space. And it’s like, “How the hell do you make that leap without losing the characters?” That’s what I’m excited for people to see is, yes, in issue #2 it’s spaceships and it’s traveling at lightspeed. And yet you never lose sight of a 12-year-old boy trying to figure out what he would look like as a man. So that’s interesting.”
Will you be checking out Impact Theory’s free comic bundle? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!