The Excavator
An illustrated supernatural thriller
Your memories belong to you.
Until someone takes them.
A mother’s memories of her son have been stolen. The stranger who took them wants a ransom.
By Eisner Award winner J. M. DeMatteis
Illustrated by Vassilis Gogtzilas
The stolen life
Sandra Rosen wakes to find a boy standing at the foot of her bed. Her husband knows him. The family photographs show him. The boy calls her Mom.
His name is Henry. He is her son. And every memory she has of him is gone.
Someone has entered Sandra’s mind and removed him with surgical precision. Henry is still there, reaching for his mother. She can feel compassion for the frightened child, but none of the love he remembers.
The search
The ransom demand offers Sandra a way to recover what she has lost. Before she can pay, the FBI intervenes.
Their psychic, Hanson Kodiak, says he can trace the intruder. To do it, he needs to enter her mind.
Sandra lets him in. But when she glimpses a way to find the thief herself, she sets out to confront him—and reclaim the memories that belong to her.
Beyond the waking world
An empty cavern marks the place where a lifetime of memories has been torn away. Elsewhere, a decaying mansion holds thoughts, fears and secrets behind its doors.
In The Excavator, the mind is a place people can enter. Its wounds become landscapes. Its buried terrors can take shape.
Vassilis Gogtzilas’s paintings carry the story from a family’s bedroom into a world where the most private parts of a life are exposed to strangers.
Screen adaptation
A child is still standing in front of his mother, but every memory she has of him is gone. The ransom thriller begins inside a family relationship.
Excavated caverns and a decaying mansion turn memory, identity and trauma into spaces that characters can explore—and struggle to escape.
Sandra refuses to leave her fate entirely in the hands of the FBI. Her search brings her face to face with the person who violated her mind.
The story asks who has the right to remove another person’s pain, and whether even our worst memories are essential parts of who we are.
The illustrated novella
An illustrated supernatural novella by J. M. DeMatteis, with art by Vassilis Gogtzilas.
Eisner Award winner J. M. DeMatteis was a professional musician and rock music journalist before launching a long career writing comic books, novels, television, and film.
Vassilis Gogtzilas is a comic book artist, painter and illustrator, known for The Bigger Bang, co-created with writer D. J. Kirkbride, and The Adventures of Augusta Wind, written by J. M. DeMatteis.
Text © 2022 J. M. DeMatteis · Illustrations © 2022 Vassilis Gogtzilas
