New York is rotting, and something monstrous is feeding on the wreckage. Indie publisher Dren Productions has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Chaos: The New Age, a brand-new adults-only comic series written by Richard Carriço and produced by Rômulo Soares that mixes sex, corruption and bloodshed into one very nasty cocktail. And readers are biting: the campaign has already blown past its funding goal, sitting at more than 270 percent with 124 backers on board and eight days still on the clock.
Billed by its creators as a sexy thriller, Chaos: The New Age is far closer to horror than that tagline lets on. The story is set in a decaying New York under the heel of a ruthless new world order, where politicians, crime bosses, the ultra-rich and religious leaders are all clawing at what’s left of the city. Into that power vacuum steps a mysterious couple with a hunger to bring every faction to its knees.
Their hunting grounds are the city’s brothels and private orgies, the places where the powerful go to indulge appetites they’d kill to keep secret. Using seduction and manipulation, the pair recruit the city’s most sought-after women into a growing clan, pulling their targets in tighter with every encounter. But their allure is only the bait. Behind it hides something inhuman, and anyone who uncovers the truth vanishes, leaving nothing but a trail of blood behind them.
Fair warning for the faint of heart: this one is explicit, and it is drenched in blood. Dren pitches the book as an adult thriller of lust, corruption and horror, but the horror is doing the heavy lifting here. Chaos: The New Age is extremely bloody and violent, the kind of gore-slicked, no-holds-barred comic that earns its adults-only label several times over.
The team behind it brings plenty of industry mileage. Soares is a comics editor, writer and producer with more than 20 years in art production; through his Lynx Studio, he has worked with publishers including Marvel and DC, and he has since launched his own independent publishing house to bring the studio’s projects to life. Carriço worked his way up through three publishing companies and is now focused on building Loyalty Publisher into a name in comics worldwide.
Based in Tall Timbers, Maryland, and run by publisher James Mascia, Dren Productions is a veteran of crowdfunding, with more than 60 Kickstarter campaigns to its name. The company has built a cult following with gleefully off-kilter genre fare like Flesh-Eating Cheerleaders, the horror anthology Tales of the Bizarre and the revenge thriller The Devil in Disguise, which marked the publisher’s 15th anniversary in 2024. Mascia has said in the past that a Dren title should be fun, and then a little off-kilter. Chaos: The New Age appears to take the “off-kilter” part and run straight off a cliff with it.
The Kickstarter for Chaos: The New Age runs through October 24, 2026, and stretch goals are now in play. Readers who want to keep tabs on the publisher’s other releases can follow Dren Productions’ newsletter.
