Quell: The Silent Takeover (Comic Concept)

This is a cover for a comic called "Quell: The Silent Takover", which I submitted as part of an assignment for my Explorations in Drawing class during college. Below is a glimpse to the storyline of the comic:

The year is 203X and the world is in deep trouble. Rising geopolitical tensions, climate change, and the threat of nuclear war all threaten humanity and human civilization to a level never seen before. Just when the global situation is at its most dire, however, a series of events occur that changes our world forever.

Astronomers first report a series of small comets that hit the Earth's surface, first in the Pacific Ocean near Tokyo, Japan, then China, then the Middle East, and soon near major cities across the world. When the governments and militaries of the world go to the crash sites to investigate, however, they are abruptly silenced and the investigations are dropped. A few pictures of the "comets" leak out into the media and the Internet-- and they are revealed to be large cocoons with broken shells. Something was inside these cocoons that had already escaped.

Following this, dozens of scientists report a higher than average metal content in the Earth's oceans, alongside evidence of black dust particles rapidly spreading in the air and water supply and into the bodies of unsuspecting people. These scientists too are subsequently silenced, and the world moves on, almost totally unaware of what is actually happening.

Then come a series of bizarre events that have no logical explanation: violence and war across the world drops, the global birth rate plummets to zero, and tens of thousands of people begin to experience unsettling symptoms of what appears to be a new brain illness. The afflicted report losing control of their bodies more and more, losing their capacity to feel emotion, hallucinations and visions of religious significance, and losing their sense of self and individuality, which is slowly being extinguished.

Psychologists and neuroscientists initially dismiss this brain illness as a so called mass psychogenic illness or mass delusion, but Max Freeman, a US neuroscientist, discovers the horrifying truth.