Read an Excerpt From Evanescence’s ‘Echoes From the Void’ Graphic Novel

Evanescence have dropped an excerpt from the first installment of their graphic novel anthology series, Echoes From the Void. Each issue of the series will tell stories inspired by various songs from throughout Evanescence’s catalog, with the first issue — shipping June 28th — drawing on two recent tracks, “Better Without You” and “Wasted on You.”

The new excerpt comes from the “Better Without You” story, which was written by frontwoman Amy Lee’s sister, Carrie Lee South, and features illustrations by Abigail Larson (Blake Northcott and Kelly McKernan wrote and illustrated the “Wasted on You” story). The opening pages find a woman in some kind of purgatory, floating through old memories as she tries to get a handle on where she is.

In an email to Rolling Stone, Amy Lee said the concept for the story came when Carrie asked her to distill “Better Without You” to a core question: “What are you better without?” Lee said her answer was fear: “Fear of the unknown, of failure, death, pain, fear is what pushes you down and encourages you not to try. Without facing our fear, we stay trapped, unable to experience life. She took that and wove it into a story about the afterlife, having to face the fear and pain of death in order to hold onto what we love most.”

Lee went on to note that some of the scenes in the excerpt are drawn directly from memories she and her sister share. The field of beautiful yellow flowers on page two, for instance, is a nod to Mt. Petit Jean in Arkansas, where the Lee family frequently visited.

“The mountain famously explodes with yellow daffodils every spring,” Lee said. “Like in the story, my memory of that is a little blurry, but I still smell the flowers and feel the love in my heart. It makes it really personal for me.”

Lee said she and Carrie are currently working on another story concept inspired by Evanescence’s 2011 song “Swimming Home” (fittingly, Carrie was living at Amy’s house in Brooklyn around the time the song was being written in 2010). Lee added that any song from Evanescence’s catalog is fair game for future issues of Echoes From the Void — “whatever sparks an idea for a writer or artist,” she said, adding, “It’s so cool to see all the different worlds that come from people’s minds, how incredibly different and also incredibly similar they can be when starting from the same source.”

Evanescence released their most recent album, The Bitter Truth, in March. The group will embark on a U.S. arena tour with Halestorm in November.