It should come as no surprise that Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez considers himself a storyteller as much as a musician, seeing how the popular prog-rock band’s output consists of sprawling thematic concept albums. With the new Image Comics series The Amory Wars, Sanchez moves his storytelling into a different medium, exchanging his band’s music for Gus Vasquez’s rough-around-the-edges, cartoony art.
The first issue introduces us to a married couple named Coheed and Cambria Kilgannon and their suburban family, which includes a teenage son named Claudio. The ’burbs they live in may look familiar, but they’re actually on a different planet, sometime in the future, when humanity shares creation with two other fantastic races, the zombie-looking Mage and naked angel ladies the Prise.
Sanchez’s story seems familiar to other pop sci-fi, most notably the first Matrix movie, some Star Wars and anime Cowboy Bebop, although his focus on a family as the protagonists instead of a single young hero is refreshingly out of the ordinary. It will be interesting to see the reaction from C and C fans versus that of the uninitiated, seeing as the comic so far lacks the epic, operatic feel of the music, the sheer complexity of which evokes a grand scale easier to intimate in music than delineate in comics.
With Killswitch Engage. July 10, 7 p.m., $23. The Pearl, 942-7777.