‘Assassin’s Creed II’ Writer Joshua Rubin Launches Comic Book Imprint Strange Land: ‘Exciting S*** That Makes You Think’

Upon hitting the 5-0, Joshua Rubin didn’t face down the barrel of midlife by purchasing a fancy sports car or trying to dye his hair a younger color.

Instead, he founded an indie comic book company. It seemed the only natural thing to do for the veteran, Emmy Award-winning video game writer behind such AAA titles as Assassin’s Creed II and Destiny.

“I didn’t want to go the corporate route,” Rubin tells me over a video call. “So much of my Hollywood life and video game journey has always been about trying to pitch ideas to corporate [higher-ups], the ones who can say yes, and most often say no. I didn’t want anyone to have to give me permission anymore. I wanted to just put my work out there. Maybe people will find it, and maybe they won’t, but those who do will be the super-fans … I want to make it with the community and I want to start with story. I just want to tell a really good story.”

The end result was Strange Land Comics, a direct-to-consumer imprint aimed at mature genre stories that “are really about death, love, and big ideas,” Rubin explains. “Comics that really are making you question the nature of reality … Exciting sh** that makes you think.” As if to underscore that idea, the basic Strange Land logo (check out three variants below) depicts a tangle of Kraken-like tentacles ominously rising out of an open book, recalling the forbidden, madness-inducing, and often octopoid knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. “[It]

fits into that genre of, ‘There is a hidden world, and it is so much bigger and more terrifying than we can possibly comprehend,’” Rubin adds.

The imprint’s flagship title, which will launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign before the end of spring, is Time Sensitive, a mind-bending mystery across the space-time continuum redolent of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Marvel Studios’ Loki series. Written by Rubin and illustrated by acclaimed Portuguese artist Jorge Coelho, the 6-issue limited series takes the Mandela effect concept to the next level with the story of Caleb Stone, an LAPD detective who suddenly loses his wife Sara just when it seemed like their failing marriage was going to make it after all.

One moment she’s there and the next, she’s gone. Poof. Vanished.

The situation only becomes more perplexing when Caleb realizes that no one in his life ever remembers him being married. He and Sara were engaged years before, but she was supposedly killed in a tragic car accident before the nuptials could take place. How can this be? Is the detective going crazy, the victim of some elaborate hallucination?

It seems so at first, but something doesn’t quite add up when similar accounts begin to pop up everywhere: regular people insisting their realities have drastically changed without explanation. Jobs, children, spouses gone — as if they’d never existed. Turns out none of them are crazy; there’s a malevolent conspiracy to erase folks taking place across the time-stream and Caleb’s only hope at finding Sara lies in a rebellious young woman named Talulah, who seems to know all about Detective Stone. “It is this sense of an organic time travel that is always going to be over your head and impossible to comprehend,” states Rubin, who cites The Time Traveler’s Wife, Primer, The Butterfly Effect, and the semi-obscure Retroactive as his main creative influences.

Years of writing vicarious thrills for video games has imbued Rubin with an innate sense of “agency and character motivation mixed together in the best way,” he says. “Bringing that to comic books really is about like giving you a great character whose story is going to hook you. You’re going to get to watch thrown in over their head and have to grow up into this world, at the same time that I’m creating a possibility space. I’m creating a world around the character that you’re going to want to explore, [a world] that is so much bigger than just that character’s journey through it.”

Fittingly enough, the idea of time not being one one’s side is what spurred Rubin to get the ball rolling on Strange Land in the first place. “Turning 50 really was a wake up call,” he remembers. “It was this moment of realizing, ‘Oh, I’m on the top of the slope now, looking over the other side.’ I’m at that age now where if I were to die, nobody would say, ‘Oh, he was tragically young.’ They would say, ‘Well, he lived a nice, long life.’ I realized I’m at this moment now where I don’t want to do anything that isn’t a ‘F*** yes!’ project. I wanted to start making things that are really original, work with small groups of artists I really respect, and make things that are ours.”

Thankfully, most of the narrative details for Time Sensitive were already worked out after years of trying to pitch it as a TV series to juggernaut producers like J.J. Abrams. “It was the most full-formed of the ideas that have been living on my shelf, trying to claw their way back out, ready to go. That was the first title I wanted to put out [under my new company],” Rubin notes. “The vision for Strange Land, the tagline, the words I keep using over and over, are ‘high concept, mind-bending brain candy.’ They’re all going to be sci-fi that looks at big ideas about time and reality [while trying] to pull the rug out from under you, from everything you think you know.”

Of course, building that Wonka-esque world of pure imagination takes plenty of elbow grease on the part of Strange Land’s founder, who feels both the elation and anxiety of any fledgling entrepreneur. “It’s so nerve-wracking, doing something new while trying to run a video game career,” Rubin concludes. “Trying to build a business on the side is crazy. It’s a nights and weekends project. But it’s something that is getting all of my nights and weekends. I’ve stopped sleeping because I want this out there in the world so much. I feel like my enthusiasm is infectious.”

Time Sensitive #1 is now available for pre-order right here. A commitment of $1 at this early juncture gets you a free pin-up illustrated by Coehlo.