Dark Horse Comics has announced the “horror in the Heartland” comic TexArcanum, a fun play off of Texarkana, the city that sits close to the Texas-Arkansas border. The title will mesh “unfamiliar mythologies and American identities into one new story,” according to the publisher.
The miniseries is by television writer/producer Christopher Monfette (Star Trek: Picard, Marvel’s Vision, 12 Monkeys) and artist Miguel Martos. They’ll be joined by colorist Patricio Delpeche and letterer Michael Heisler.
“Avery might wear a cowboy hat, drive a pick-up and talk with the dry wit of a Middle-American noir-PI, but he travels through pockets of culture and folklore that are seldom explored and yet the very definition of this country,” said Monfette. “American horror is too often defined by Western European scares – vampires, werewolves, Victorian-style ghosts – and the truth is that this country is made up of communities who’ve brought their own unique folklore along with them.”
Here’s how Dark Horse describes the series:
America is a melting pot for the unknown. Ghosts and gods, angels and demons, horror stories and tall-tales, they’ve traveled from across the globe to collide here in the rural Heartland… and cowboy arcanist Avery Belle has spent a very long lifetime among them. When a centuries-old land feud escalates into the supernatural, when two warring families threaten a low-country apocalypse, only Belle can unearth the truth. TexArcanum is Yellowstone meets X-Files, Elmore Leonard meets Stephen King, horror-noir in the mystic Mid-West.
“I created TexArcanum as a way to mash-together unfamiliar mythologies in the sandbox of the American heartland,” said Monfette. “A midnight drive through the middle of nowhere. The vast, empty plains – the oil derricks and wind turbines – the small towns and tourist stops – these are places with secrets and magics and wonders to hide. My hope is that TexArcanum offers a platform and a character that myself or future writers with far more diverse backgrounds than me could use to tell the kinds of genre stories I’ve really never seen but desperately search for…”
The first issue arrives in stores July 23.