Imagine you're playing with Kylie Jenner's new app or listening to Ryan Adams' 1989 on repeat, when suddenly an app appears on your phone that you don't remember downloading. When you open it, the founder of your favorite social media platform shows up on your screen and tells you that you've been selected at random to be one of his heirs -- there are 140 of you in total, and soon you're all going to receive millions of dollars.

Sounds like a dream come true, right? But there's a catch, of course. The money will be divided equally among every single one of the chosen people who are still alive when the social media mogul dies -- meaning that someone else might try to murder you so they can increase their own share of the cash.

That's the plot of "Unfollow," a brand new comic series from Vertigo comics in which 140 different strangers become part of the biggest, most dangerous windfall in history, thanks to a handy little app called "Chirper." (Get it?) The first issue comes out in November and features characters from all walks of life -- like Dave, a young man trying not to get arrested in St. Louis, or Courtney, an heiress who gives all her money to charity only to be given more by her mysterious benefactor. And, of course, as the world discovers that 140 people among them are soon to be millionaires, things will get more intense... and even downright deadly.

To get a feel for what you can expect from this amazing, terrifying series, we spoke to "Unfollow" creators Rob Williams and Michael Dowling about whether or not they think social media spells doom for humanity, and why winning the lottery is not all it's cracked up to be.

MTV: When did the idea to do a story like this with social media come about?

Rob Williams: The social media thing came about largely because I get given a hard time in my house by my partner -- you know, “Put the phone down, put the iPad down,” and it did sort of become a point how much it infringes upon day to day life, how much unproductive time I spend on Twitter or Facebook. It just got us thinking. That was one of the things that when Mike [Dowling] and I were talking what we wanted to do together. Mike wanted to do something very much about [humans] never having left the food chain, some kind of hunt idea, and I felt like there was a story to do about Twitter and social media and I felt like it was out there and someone was going to do it. So the ideas came together and the whole idea about followers online and Twitter mobs and primal aspects of human behavior, they just seemed to lend itself to this story.

MTV: I thought it was interesting how in the first issue, you make it a point of saying how many followers each character currently has.

Williams: It's something that we will be playing with and something we need to keep an eye on. A lot of these characters, when you first meet them, they haven't become famous yet. The effect of celebrity is a big part of the book and how that affects people and what it does to people's lives is a theme. When they're named as "The Chosen 140," they become celebrities and their Twitter followers go up, or Chirper followers as we call it in the book. And there is an effect that has on people.

One of the interesting things, I'm sure it happens in real life, is that people assume if this actually happened -- an actor appeared on your phone and suddenly you were to be given millions of dollars, and your life would be changed -- it would be the happiest day, you would think your life had changed for the better. But then, as you see with the book, these people become the hunted in so many ways, and suddenly their lives don't necessarily become better and in fact in certain cases their lives become immeasurably worse. All these things are in “Unfollow.” It’s a contemporary thriller with themes of social media and celebrity and how it affects us. We're trying to cram in as much stuff as we can.

MTV: The “billionaire leaving everything to complete strangers” is such a prevalent trope in pop culture. Why do you think these types of stories capture our imagination so well?

Michael Dowling: We’d all like a million bucks! [laughs] It’s a tantalizing idea, that you can come into all this money through chance, that’s all that it takes and you can suddenly become super rich. And it's like Willy Wonka, and to an extent like the lottery. It's quite democratic -- there's a possibility for everyone, that’s quite an appealing idea. But whether that will make you happy or not -- As you follow the story, for the people that have won the lottery, it goes in quite the opposite direction and provokes great difficulties in their lives. And in “Unfollow,” we're adding more wrinkles to this problem where there's this sort of side to it, it’s questioning whether people -- if they can increase their share of this money they’ve come into by the death of other people in the 140, then what happens to the group dynamic at this point? Who is to be trusted?

Williams: The idea of it is like Wonka's golden ticket, where an app can appear on your phone and suddenly you get millions. In its own way it can be like the black spot from “Treasure Island,” it is it's own little mark of death as well. But the people who have been chosen initially, that’s a nasty twist that is coming for them down the road. Initially they think they won the lottery.

MTV:Are we going to meet all 140 characters before they start to be hunted down?

Williams: The initial working title of the book was "140 Characters." One of the things that appealed about the premise, from a story-telling point of view, is that you can tell any number of stories of people from all walks of life all around the world and you can tell those stories and then you can kill those people in interesting ways. I mean, you will meet a lot of them, I'm not sure you will meet all 140 they might start getting knocked off a bit quicker than that. It does leave…there is a huge amount of narrative possibilities with this premise which is one of the things that really excited us about it.

MTV: I feel like there's a lot of possibilities with storytelling with just Twitter as an app using 140 characters, so the parallels there are really great.

Williams: Yeah, if I ever turn around and say I'm going to tell an entire issue in 140 characters or less then I need hitting with a frying pan, I think, because that would be impossible. But apparently I've been reading this week that Twitter is going to do away with the 140 character limit, aren't they?

MTV: That was going to be my next question! Were you worried about relying too heavily on the way we use social media now? Do you think Twitter could go the way of Friendster in 10 years and it might affect the way future readers read this book?

Williams: That is a possibility that it might be something of its time, but I don’t think there is any harm in that because it is very much a story that we are writing about now. The themes will translate. We as a species never really left the food chain, we never left the jungle, we're just kind of ever-bettering technology. Also, the themes of celebrity, how sort of shallow that is -- we follow people, we're lead by charismatic people, all those things will remain.

Dowling: technology is there to illuminate the story. I think if it’s passed, it’s not a terrible thing, because the book is about these characters as much as it is about how our lives are being shaped by technology.

Williams: If we’d done this comic a hundred years ago, we would have done it on the dangers of tin cans and string and how people are communicating that way.

MTV:Adding to that, do you think that social media has fundamentally changed human behavior in any particular way?

Dowling: I don't know, I'm not a big social media user. I don’t think it does, it doesn’t change who we intrinsically are. It just surfaces that in different ways. Like when on everyone on Twitter rounds on somebody and essentially puts them in the stocks and throw rotten fruit at them because they said the wrong thing, or they were insensitive in some way, or they were judged to be lacking. It’s very medieval really, the way the Internet can turn on a person. So no, it does change us in some ways but I think at the core, we're the same kind of animal.

Williams: Yeah, that’s part of what the book is saying, really. It’s interesting, you look at social media in the real world and there was this of swell of over things like the Arab Spring and how social media would help facilitate that, and people thought, ‘Oh, it’s changing the world in such a better way!” But then like Mike said, you have to look at your Twitter feed every day and there's such horrible things, there's people being hounded off twitter and sort of horrible comments. It's just a new means for people to filter human behavior through, both good and horrible.

And that’s what our characters are, they are given this choice. They’re told, “Look, you’ve this journey you are going to go on and you can choose to be a good person with this money. or you can choose to go and kill a few others and go and increase your share.” And you know for well, human beings, being who we are, some people are going to choose the good road and some are going to choose the selfish, nasty road.