Black Mask’s Young Terrorists Gets Collected Ahead Of Billionaire Killers
by Hannah Means Shannon
In May, we’ll see the first ever collection of Black Mask Studios’ series Young Terrorists, from the same creators as Calexit.
Three years ago, writer Matteo Pizzolo and artist Amancay Nahuelpan began a comic book series that portrayed “a strange near-future where celebrities and CEOs run the U.S. government, internet conspiracy theorists provide counsel to political elites, and populist anger rages on all sides”. Um, yeah. Though it may sound like it’s about our current climate, Pizzolo had some prior experiences to draw on:
Although it may seem prescient, YOUNG TERRORISTS is inspired by my own run-in with the Washington DC swamp. I was running an indie film company, and I picked up a documentary about animal rights activists whose direct action campaign had a devastating impact on a leading testing lab. The non-violent activists went to federal prison as terrorists under the PATRIOT Act through a Bush-era law and the documentary was a powerful, though surprisingly evenhanded, story of their journey. I knew it would be controversial, but I believed in the film’s complex and empathetic message, so I decided to champion it. What I didn’t know was that one of the major Washington lobbying firms who had actually helped push the law through Congress had been hired by powerful animal-industry corporations to bury the documentary.
The result was years of my life spent fighting off scores of white collar trolls whose full time job is to make life miserable for anyone who falls into their Big Money’s crosshairs. Every day I was greeted by a new frivolous lawsuit, another movie theater dropping the film, another awful conversation trying to calm an old friend who’d received an anonymous phone call about some horrible, sordid thing I’d done in my past. (Spoiler: none of it was true). I even wound up on TMZ. Their job was simply to mess with my life, waste my time, and make my family miserable until I just gave up and dropped the film… which I refused to do. Most of us go through every day without ever having to deal with this power structure, but, if you happen to catch its attention, it suddenly feels like the entire world has just turned against you.
In the series Young Terrorists, a young heiress discovers her father is part of this tyrannical new world order and vows to burn his empire down. The series is actually continuing in June 2018 with a follow-up story called Billionaire Killers by Pizzolo and artist Soo Lee.
In Billionaire Killers, two young women, Sera and Pru are heiresses to their industrialist fathers’ empires, and when they learn that their families’ money has been earned by causing global suffering, they decide to go to war against their parents.
Young Terrorists TPB arrives this Wednesday, May 2nd, in comic shops, and in bookstores on Tuesday, May 15th.
