“What if The Smoking Man from The X-Files was a real person, and his daughter found out what he did for a living?”

That is the core question behind Young Terrorists, a thrilling new comic from writer Matt Pizzolo and artist Amancay Nahuelpan. The forthcoming title from Black Mask Studios is a political thriller that examines what happens when a system of oppression, corporate greed, and institutionalized  corruption reaches a boiling point.

The story follows Sera, the imprisoned daughter of a “globalist kingpin” who is being tortured and interrogated so a shadowy organization can learn her father’s secrets. Alongside her fellow prisoners, she orchestrates a jailbreak and enters into a full-on battle against her captors, paramilitary groups, and the institutions that back them. In other words, it’s violent, aggressive, and taps into an undercurrent of rage against the proverbial machine that is pervasive in the world around us.

The world that Pizzolo and Naheulpan have created in Young Terrorists feels almost like a cautionary tale. People regularly wind up in shootouts with the police. School lockers are packed to the gills with automatic weapons rather than books. Explosions devastate local businesses. Underground fight clubs are becoming an increasingly common occurrence among America’s youth. Basically, America is tearing itself apart, and someone needs to do something before it’s too late.

In our exclusive preview of Young Terrorists #1, we take a look at one of these aforementioned fight clubs. It is brutal, violent, and shocking in all the right ways — and you can take a look for yourself in our gallery below.

Here is the official synopsis:

“The daughter of an assassinated globalist kingpin breaks out of an internment camp and leads her fellow escaped prisoners in a battle against an elitist conspiracy of shadow governments, megabanks, and military juntas in this edgy and subversive sci-fi thriller. Incendiary writer Matt Pizzolo and striking newcomer Amancay Nahuelpan unleash this tour-de-force that fearlessly assaults politics-as-usual. Young Terrorists continues the legacy of DMZ and The Invisibles as it manically rips the scab off life under the new world order and revels in the pus underneath.”

Young Terrorists #1 hits store shelves on August 19, 2015.

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Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of 100 Things Avengers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. You can follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).