David Aja shares the secret origin of The Seeds ahead of its conclusion

(Image credit: David Aja (Dark Horse Comics/Berger Books))

Three years after it originally began, Ann Nocenti and David Aja's The Seeds culminates December 23 with the release of the collected edition - which includes the unreleased, final two issues of the four-issue series. And while its publication had some twists and turns, so did its conception.

Dark Horse Comics has provided Newsarama with Aja's afterword to The Seeds graphic novel/collection, which goes into his and Nocenti's original version of the story, their failed attempt pitching it to DC's Vertigo Comics imprint, and how it finally found a home at Dark Horse.

Here's Aja's afterword, titled 'Blame the Wormholes':

There is a magpie on my window and I meet Ann Nocenti doing a couple of Daredevil stories back in 2009.

I grew up reading her comics and I already loved her. Over the years we talked about doing something together again, shared tons of crazy ideas and finally, in 2016 we had a story called Scoop. It was set in '90s and was about a reporter searching for a possible alien, love, fake news... I know, if you already have read this book all this sounds familiar to you.

I was going to work with one of my favorite creators - but we needed an editor. So I thought on my favorite and most loved one as well, Karen Berger. And you know what? Ann knew Karen. We sent her our Scoop pitch and... she rejected it. Ann and I contacted some other publishers and editors but something just didn't fit, and we almost ditched the project. Almost.

In 2017 we started thinking on giving it a twist. I have always loved dystopias and gas masks, so we started thinking of placing it in a near-future or parallel reality. One thing led us to another, and suddenly we had the new pitch of the story you have just read. At the same time I saw in the news that Karen was going to start a new imprint with Dark Horse, so we sent her the new pitch, and it seems this time we did it better - she wanted it!

I remember kidding at the beginning of the project comparing our work relationship with a cheap horror movie advertisement: "For him, working with them was a dream. Now they will know working with him is a nightmare."

Ann, Karen, thank you.

We started our fiction, The Seeds, at the end of 2017, reality happened in between, and we finished it at the beginning of 2020, just in time for a global pandemic.

Fiction has its own time and places, but it is based on reality. A friend of mine used to say that "everything is plagiarism but autobiography." In any fiction, we represent reality and experiences that happen close to us, experiences, or on the other hand, something we have been influenced by that we like.

Albert Camus, writing about Franz Kafka's work, said Kafka fails as an Absurd writer because his work retains a glimmer of hope. And maybe that could be a metaphor of reality around us. Maybe reality is where we can find way more horror, but also we fun, joy, tenderness, lies, ugliness, and beauty. It's where we lose people we love and try to take care of those near us.

But I think there is also hope.

And a magpie on my window.

The Seeds collection will be available online the same day it debuts in print. Check out our list of the best comics readers for Android and iOS devices.

Newsarama is a comic book website covering news, interviews, features, deep dives, reviews and more. Now part of GamesRadar, the website was first established in 1995 by Michael Doran.