Gray: Vol. 1

“An inventive, empowered, and thoroughly entertaining twist on a classic. Gorgeous, provocative, and damn hard to put down.” ―Diablo Cody (Oscar winning screenwriter of Juno, Jennifer's Body, and Young Adult)

“I can resist everything except a really clever contemporary take on The Portrait of Dorian Gray." -―David Baddiel (Best selling British comedian and author of The Parent Agency, and The Secret Purposes)

"Incisive, intriguing, wickedly funny. Every bit as clever as it thinks it is." -―Mike Carey (Eisner nominated writer of Unwritten, and Lucifer)

A contemporary reimaging of the classic Oscar Wilde novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Gray is a supernatural revenge thriller about an alluring but violent woman, Dorian Gray, who seeks vengeance on a cabal of powerful men who wronged her years ago; and of the straight-laced African American detective with a past of his own, who is tasked with stopping her.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only novel and one of the classics of gothic literature, is the tale of the most beautiful man of his age, who sells his soul and his conscience in exchange for eternal youth, beauty and power ― and who spends his life murdering, raping and corrupting. All the time in his attic, his picture degrades and rots.

GRAY takes that basic idea but flips its moral framework and gender archetypes: our DORIAN GRAY is a Millennial social media princess who drifts through the coolest cliques of NYC, breaking hearts and turning heads wherever she goes. But Dorian has secrets. For one thing, she’s a violent criminal. For another, she’s an immortal creature of magic, who commits violent burglaries and assaults some of New York’s most powerful men.

30 years ago, whilst an innocent student, Dorian was sexually assaulted by these men. In that moment that she became something both more and less than human. 30 years later, but not a day older, she’s ready for her revenge. Then Dorian meets Detective HANK WUTAN, the African-American NYPD detective assigned to stop these crimes, struggling with his own loyalties as a Black cop in the era of Defund the Police. Despite the fact that Dorian is his suspect number one, and he is effectively working for her abusers, they fall for each other, hard.

GRAY takes Wilde’s classic novel and reinvents it as a tale of cathartic revenge for the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter era, a violent fantasy about how powerful, super-rich white men don’t always win, how the powerless can find justice, and about how a murderous demon and a law-abiding detective can be soul mates.