Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
Check your pulse with Maria Llovet's new vampire horror series for Boom!, Heartbeat
Bleeding past the traditional Halloween season and towards the shopping horror of the holidays comes a new vampiric miniseries from Boom! Studios titled Heartbeat, delivered like a red dagger from the provocative mind of Maria Llovet — and SYFY WIRE has an exclusive preview of the dark and decadent debut issue.
Llovet is most recently known for Faithless, her racy erotic thriller with Batman: Damned's Brian Azzarello, also at Boom! Studios, and here she pulls double duty as writer and artist by exploring a disturbing story where death, blood, and love are inextricably intertwined.
Beating to a hypnotic rhythm, the storyline follows a high school outcast named Eva, who finds herself witnessing an unsettling secret: the most popular boy in school enjoys tasting the metallic tang of blood and will murder to get his hands on it and consume more.
Horrified yet oddly interested, Eva allows herself be pulled into Donatien’s disorienting world where he freely offers the escape she's been looking for. Llovet explores the question of how much Eva is willing to betray her own moral code in order to find something that gives her montonous life meaning.
"I’m very excited for the release of Heartbeat in English!," Llovet tells SYFY WIRE. "What’s most interesting for me about Heartbeat is seeing how the characters interact with each other and get dragged together in a negative spiral.
"I hope people will enjoy it even if my style has evolved so much since I drew it," she adds. "I think that’s fascinating that humans can choose what’s wrong knowingly. All the characters here know their options but seem to choose all the wrong ones regardless."
Llovet claims the idea for Heartbeat came from viewing the Japanese movie Kokuhaku (Confessions), in which they mentioned two girls that were fans of a psycho-killer. That concept made her think, what if her main character was to see the person she had a crush on doing something truly horrifying.
Dip into our preview of Boom!'s Heartbeat #1 in the full gallery below, with an alluring variant cover by Unnatural's Mirka Andolfo, then let us know if you're intrigued enough to bite into the premiere issue when it arrives on Nov. 20.
