Original title: Legado de sombras

Writer: Gastón N. Flores

Illustrator: Pablo Ayala

Original Publication: Alquimia Comics + CB Comics (Argentina, 2017)

Format: 40 pages, color, 24 cm x 17 cm.

Rights details: Worldwide rights available

About the book:

A legacy of shadows

A graphic novel by Gastón N. Flores (script) and Pablo Ayala (pencils and digital color)

Original publication: Alquimia Comics and CB Comics (2017, Argentina)

Cover art: Nico Di Mattia.

Format: 40 pages, digital color. 24 cm x 17 cm.

Rights details: Worldwide rights available

This is a story about identity and the cost that sometimes must be paid to discover an awckard truth, and about how past doesn't define our future.

Logline: Tessa discovers that she is adopted and decides to escape her abusive father by seeking her real family, that ends up being a dinasty of witches. She is their only living descendent and the spirits of her ancestors force her to follow their steps, so she risks her life by refusing and finally finding a way out.

Tagline: A troubled teenager seeks her origin in a haunted house.

Storyline: Tessa is a teenage girl living in a rural area. She doesn't fit in her family: her father abuses her fisically and mentally, and she thinks that's because she is adopted. In one of her crisis she runs away from home to seek her true origin. Her investigation leads her to the abandoned house of the Mullingers, a family that, according to local legends, practiced witchcraft for centuries. Tessa thinks she is Abigail Mulliger's daughter, the last one of the clan, that died while giving birth. At the mansion she finds an old woman, who confirms Tessa that she is in fact Abigail's daughter and part of a large tradition of black magic. The woman says to be Ingrid Mullinger, her grandmother, and Tessa finds out that the people in the mansion are the spirits of her ancestors.

Ingrid encourages her to talk to Helen, her great grandmother, who can make her a witch. Tessa likes the idea of having some power over her life, but Helen rejects her. Being raised outside the Mullinger family, she doesn't have the malice to be a witch, nor the cold blood to make the human sacrifice that the iniciation ritual needs. Helen then tries to manipulate her to commit suicide, promising to gave her great powers once she makes the sacrifice. However, Tessa doesn't like the idea, so Helen and the others attack her and she has to escape. The old building catches fire and Tessa manages to get away at the last minute.

Some years later, Tessa sneeks inside the cementery were her mother is buried and makes contact with her spirit. Abigail answers her questions: as a member of the Mullinger family, she made many mistakes but tried to escape the witchcraft tradition. Sadly she died alone, with no one to tell her story or take care of Tessa. Her daughter wants to know the identity of her father, but Abigail refuses. Instead, she reveals the location of some money and valuable objets that she stole from the mansion, so Tessa can have a better life now that she is an adult.