Alexandra Grant has announced an upcoming comic series, Nano, which she says was shaped during a severe bout of COVID-19.
The three-part sci-fi series, created with Matt Kindt, began when Grant revisited a novel she had written two decades earlier.
“I got super sick, I had super COVID and was testing positive for 16 days. I mean I was hallucinating,” she told People.
“By day six, I was like, what am I going to do? I couldn’t leave the room. So I went into my computer, and I found my novel from 20 years before, and I rewrote it, but I rewrote it in my COVID fever dream stage.”
The idea was reworked into a comic centered around Sana, an operative navigating a secret organisation and a high-stakes mission, and then shared with Matt Kindt, who writes the BRZRKR series with Reeves.
“Matt had been in our home a lot, working with Keanu,” she explained of Kindt, who then offered to work with her through Dark Horse Comics.
“So I got to know him, and he had told me to send him something once. I asked if I could send him something else instead,” she recalled. “He didn’t reply for weeks! I was like, ‘Oh he hates it.’ Then he finally wrote back and said, ‘I want to offer you a comic-book deal,’ through his imprint with Dark Horse comics.”
She continued, “I brought the story and the characters, and he [Kindt] helped shape the narrative arc.”
The process also involved selecting an illustrator, for which Grant went out of her way to choose Brazilian artist Natasha Bustos after being sent a list of “white males.”
“Natasha had never been given a comic book to do from start to finish… and she’s completely exceptional,” Grant said. “She took the words and imagined and embodied them perfectly.”
Grant describes Nano as a clash between science and nature, blending themes of technology, magic, and power. “I wanted this character to be completely kick-ass… smart… frustrated at the patriarchy. But it’s also about the power of nature, and magic coming into conflict with masculinity, toxicity, and authoritarianism.”
In a statement, Grant said, “Nano is a story that I’ve been daydreaming about for over twenty years—of two worlds clashing together—that of science and technology and that of magic and nature.”
“I think we’re all still suffering in ways from COVID, but the experience I had was one of creative isolation… it was a very creative time for a lot of artists,” she said. “We were isolated, yet connected… it was sci-fi for all of us.”
Meanwhile, Kindt added, “This started as literal fever dream that Alexandra had and was sharing with me. It was so vivid and intricate I was desperate to see it come to life. It has such big and wild ideas that it seemed perfectly suited to comics, and I’m honoured to be a part of it.”
