The Drugs Don't Work

Abigail Chandler Talks to Karen Berger and Sara Kenney About Their New “antibiotic Apocalypse” Thriller, Surgeon X

- Karen Berger And Sara Kenney

Antibiotics are, for the most part, something that we take for granted these days. But one of the most frightening predictions for the near future is that they may eventually stop working... 

Surgeon X is a new series from Image Comics, edited by former Vertigo Executive Editor Karen Berger and written by newcomer Sara Kenney, with funding from charitable organisation The Wellcome Trust (which funds projects with a focus on medicine). It paints a grim portrait of a world that has been torn apart by just such a crisis. It’s 2036 and the drugs don’t work, with the few that do reserved for the rich and powerful... The titular character, Rosa, is a “vigilante surgeon who bucks the system” and heads out to save the lives of those who truly deserve it, says Berger. She “eventually evolves – or even devolves – and gets this sort of God complex very much like Walter White does in Breaking Bad... She’s so good at saving lives that she really lets it go to her head. She will decide who will live and who will die.”

The idea came to Kenney in its earliest form 10 years ago, as a potential Future Shock for 2000 AD, which she never actually submitted. “I just never felt brave enough. I never pursued it until now,” she says. Kenney spent the next 10 years establishing herself as a documentary maker (while also working on Casualty and releasing an animated film she scripted, Angels & Ghosts), but the idea never really left her. And after working with The Wellcome Trust on previous projects, she realised that they could provide her with the funding she needed to get the comic off the ground.

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