Naughty Dog announces The Last of Us: American Dreams as four-issue comic prequel

Naughty Dog and Dark Horse has announced plans to release a comic telling the backstory of Ellie from The Last of Us, as well as a The Last of Us art book. Four issue miniseries The Last of Us: American Dreams will show that Ellie “has grown up in a postpandemic world, shuttled between military orphanages in one of the last remaining quarantine zones and resigned to the fact that when she’s old enough, she’ll be channeled into the army or left to fend for herself—until she meets an older girl determined to find a third way out.”

American Dreams will explore “the first steps” of the journey that leads Ellie to meeting Joel and sets the stage for the story of The Last of Us. For more on exactly how American Dreams will factor into the plot of the game, we spoke with Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann, who will be writing the comic along with co-writer and artist Faith Erin Hicks.

“At first I was very reluctant to do anything like this, just because we’re still developing the game,” Druckmann told IGN. “There’s a lot to be done in the game and it requires so much energy that I didn’t want to be distracted by something else. At the same time, I didn’t want to just hand off these characters and find a writer, find an artist and do this thing and just say it’s not canon. If we were going to do this, we wanted to do it right.”

Source: IGN