Month: February 2024

Brubaker + Phillips explore the ’80s ‘Satanic Panic’ in ‘Houses of the Unholy’

The graphic novel will arrive in stores in August.

Image Comics has announced the next graphic novel coming from the award-winning team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, arguably comics’ greatest creative team right now. Houses of the Unholy will explore the “Satanic Panic” craze of the 1980s, which involved conspiracy theories that grew from unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse.

“Houses of the Unholy is something I’ve been describing as Satanic Panic Noir. It’s somewhere in-between a creepy horror story and a fucked-up noir, and directly tied to the Satanic Panic craze of the ’80s,” said Brubaker. “The book really speaks to my obsessions with cult horror, and plays with the demonic tropes of classic horror from Hammer to Carpenter to Stephen King. The fear that was everywhere back then has clearly resurfaced, and that made me want to dive back into those dark waters and try to find a Brubaker-Phillips take on noir and horror at the same time.”

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Lewis + Barravecchia prepare for ‘blood-splattered’ conquest in ‘Bear Pirate Viking Queen’

The three-issue high-fantasy miniseries begins in May.

Sean Lewis will team up with artist/painter  Jonathan Marks Barravecchia for “a blood-splattered story of conquest.” Bear Pirate Viking Queen, coming from Image Comics this May, is billed as a high fantasy story, and from what I can tell, it does not feature a bear who is also a queen, pirate and viking at the same time (although I’ll be pleasantly surprised if that is, indeed, the case).

Lewis said he was inspired by an Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell classic when creating the story.

“I always wanted to make something that hit me like From Hell the first time I read it,” said Lewis. “Something with historical scope, something with a really uncompromised visual beauty, and something that felt BIG. Jonathan’s work is incredible. The story is one I am incredibly proud of. We are shooting for ‘canon’ with this one.”

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Black Panther stalks the night as a vampire in ‘Black Panther: Blood Hunt’

The tie-in miniseries to Marvel’s big ‘Blood Hunt’ event is by Cheryl Lynn Eaton and Farid Karami.

Marvel has announced the first tie-in miniseries for the upcoming Blood Hunt event, which will see Marvel’s heroes face off with an emboldened vampire population. That miniseries will see Black Panther return to Wakanda — as a vampire!

Black Panther: Blood Hunt by Cheryl Lynn Eaton and Farid Karami sees the exiled king face a “soul-crushing struggle between protecting his people from his new brothers and satisfying his new overpowering thirst for blood.”

“Long live the king! Literally! While T’Challa has always been the height of human excellence, steering such a legendary character as he navigates a supernatural battlefield populated with gods and monsters—all while adapting to a form and newfound powers unfamiliar to him—has been a treat,” Eaton told Marvel.com. “T’Challa’s royal status is not just Wakandan in nature, but vampiric as well. And I can’t wait to explore both of those bloodlines. No pun intended!”

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Cafu gives Carnage a frightening makeover in Marvel’s ‘Symbiosis Necrosis’ event

Venom and Carnage will try to eat each other again in a four-part event this spring.

Venom and Carnage will cross over in March and April, bringing together Cletus Kasaday and Dylan Brock for the first time, and debuting a new look for Carnage.

The crossover will be written by Torunn Grønbekk and Al Ewing, with art by Ken Lashley, who also will do a series of connecting variant covers for the crossover, and Pere Pérez.

“There is some family drama going on here because technically they’re both the child of Eddie or Venom in a sort of strange way and it felt natural to bring them together,” Grønbekk said on the This Week at Marvel podcast. “It brings up, especially for Dylan, all the secrets that Venom has kept from him. Venom was the one who made Eddie do horrible things. If Dylan sees the full extent of what Venom has done in this world, it might not be great.”

Here’s the new look for Carnage, designed by Cafu:

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Slugfest | Dark Horse will release Sergio Aragonés’ ‘Louder Than Words, Actions Speak’

Plus: LEGO Ninjago, free ‘Barbaric,’ 350 issues of ‘Spawn’ and more.

Slugfest is a roundup of cool announcements about projects coming to a shelf near you. Hit the links for more information.

Dark Horse has announced plans to collect Sergio Aragonés’ Louder Than Words and Actions Speak miniseries into one volume appropriately called Louder Than Words, Actions Speak.

Both volumes came out about 20 years ago and were previously collected by Dark Horse. The collection will have a new cover by Dark Horse by Aragonés and colorist Carrie Strachan.

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Doctor Doom battles Galactus in Hickman + Greene’s ‘Doom’

The one-shot arrives from Marvel in May.

Jonathan Hickman and Sanford Greene will team for a battle for the ages, as Doctor Doom battles Galactus “to save all that is and to try to attain a cosmic status that he’s only ever dreamed of.”

The one-shot Doom will arrive in May from Marvel, based on a story idea by the Bitter Root co-creator.

“Growing up reading Marvel Comics, I became fascinated by Doctor Doom and how he potentially is the center of the entire Marvel Universe!” Greene said. “He is one of my bucket list characters and this story is somewhat a love letter to Doom and Marvel.”

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Tieri + Miranda set sail again for a second volume of ‘Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons’

The five-issue miniseries kicks off in June.

The official Godzilla site has news on Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons II – Sons of Giants, a sequel to the 2023 miniseries by writer Frank Tieri and artist Inaki Miranda.

The five-issue miniseries will pick up where the first volume left off, continuing a story from the 1500s that saw Sir Francis Drake encounter Godzilla on his trip around the world. The Sons of Giants, a monster-worshipping cult that protected the secrets of the kaiju, will play prominently in the new story.

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Ennis + Burrows pit the Punisher against Nick Fury in ‘Get Fury’

The Marvel MAX miniseries set during the Vietnam War begins in May.

Garth Ennis, writer of many memorable Punisher stories during the Marvel Knights and MAX eras, will re-team with his Punisher Soviet and Crossed collaborator Jacen Burrows for Get Fury, a new MAX miniseries that kicks off in May.

Ennis mentioned the project back in 2019 in an interview with The Lakes International Comic Art Festival, right before Punisher Soviet kicked off. Set in Vietnam, the out-of-continuity story features Nick Fury being held hostage by the Viet Cong — and the CIA sends in Lt. Frank Castle to protect their secrets.

“There’s a nice sense of things coming full circle with Get Fury; the editor is my good friend Nick Lowe, who handled Born back at the beginning some 20+ years ago, and just like that story, this one sees Frank Castle as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam (in fact, it goes some way to explaining how he ended up at Firebase Valley Forge in the first place),” Ennis said.

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Image will publish ‘Drawing Blood’ as a 12-issue series

Originally crowdfunded as a graphic novel, the series fictionalizes Kevin Eastman’s life as a comics creator.

Drawing Blood, the semi-autobiographical tale of Kevin Eastman’s rise in the comics world that was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter back in 2017, is coming to Image Comics as a 12-issue maxi-series in April.

“The completely fictional true stories of Shane ‘Books’ Bookman sums it up the best,” said Eastman. “Set squarely in our collective world of Comics, part autobiographical, part tall tails and legends, I wanted a fictional character we could really put through the paces. Drawing Blood is all that and a basket of kittens…”

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Venom faces the Purple Man in Michelinie + Sandoval’s ‘Venom: Separation Anxiety’

The retro miniseries kicks off in May.

Venom co-creator David Michelinie returns to the character again this year for another miniseries set during Venom’s early days.

Venom: Separation Anxiety by Michelinie and Death of the Venomverse artist Gerardo Sandoval will feature Eddie Brock encountering the Purple Man, who uses his powers to steal Brock’s symbiote and become “The King in Purple.”

“I’m always delighted to write a new Venom story in a retro background,” Michelinie said. “With ‘Separation Anxiety’ as the required theme, the problem became how to do something that’s already been done—have Eddie Brock separated from his symbiote ‘other.’ So I thought, what if there was a deeply creepy villain with a decidedly bloodthirsty agenda who was able to take bits of Eddie’s symbiote away every time the two touched, with that enemy slowly growing stronger as Venom slowly grew weaker? And that was the nugget that became ‘The King In Purple.'”

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Fawkes + Fuso impose a ‘Sanction’ on Mad Cave Studios

Set in the USSR in 1987, the crime story will see two detectives discover a body on New Year’s Day.

Ray Fawkes of In the Flood and Justice League Dark fame will team with Wyrd artist Antonio Fuso for Sanction, a new Soviet-era crime story coming from Mad Cave Studios in May.

They are joined by Dave Sharpe on colors and letterer Emilio Lecce on the project, which Fawkes said is “the gritty, high-impact, never-seen-this-before crime book I’ve always wanted to write.”

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Quick Hits | Rest in peace, José Delbo

Plus: Amy Chu, Rob Liefeld, Frank Johnson and what the heck is going on with Cadence Comic Art?

José María Del Bó, known professionally as José Delbo, passed away at the age of 90 yesterday. The news was reported on social media by his grandson.

The Argentine comics artist career began in the 1940s as a teenager, with a science fiction tale that appeared Carlos Clemen’s Suspenso title. He left Argentina in the 1960s, migrating first to Brazil and then to the United States in 1965. He worked for Charlton, Dell and Gold Key, contributing art to many of their TV adaptations, including The Brady Bunch, Gentle Ben, The Monkees, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Yellow Submarine.

In the late 1960s, he began drawing comics for DC, working on Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, World’s Finest, Batman Family and Wonder Woman, which he drew for about five years in the late 1970s. From there he moved to Marvel, where he worked on their popular Transformers comic, as well as ThunderCats, Captain Planet and the Planeteers and NFL SuperPro. He also worked on The Phantom and the Superman comic strips.

Together he and writer Simon Furman created Brute Force, a short-lived Marvel series that was intended to be a toy line, but that never came to pass. The series was revived a couple years ago as an Infinity Comics title.

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