Dark Horse Comics is bringing the Three Worlds/Three Moons comics by Jonathan Hickman, Mike Del Mundo, Mike Huddleston, Nick Spencer and many more to print, beginning with a 32-page one-shot titled Foundations in July.
“We are incredibly excited for the opportunity to partner with Dark Horse so that comic stores and comic fans can get to experience this project that has been years in the making,” Hickman said.
The Three Worlds/Three Moons line debuted on Substack back in 2021, as part of a wave of digital comics that were hosted on the platform, along with James Tynion IV, Saladin Ahmed, Skottie Young, Jeff Lemire, Chip Zdarsky and several others. It was part of a bigger push by Substack to recruit content creators of all sorts to its subscription-model service — some of whom turned out to be less than desirable additions.
But for the creators, it was said to be a lucrative deal, and they used the platform to deliver content to paid subscribers. Until they didn’t. Many creators shifted away from the paid model once their first year was up; some turned their newsletters into promotional tools, while others left the platform altogether. In most cases, the print comics they were producing also had print deals in place, either before they started or soon after; comics like Christopher Chaos and Fishflies eventually arrived from publishers like Dark Horse and Image Comics.
But not Three Worlds/Three Moons. Hickman, Del Mundi, Huddleston and the rest of their crew were the exception and remained on the platform, keeping the subscriber model intact and produced a whole heck of a lot of content, by themselves and with a slew of top creators like Ram V, Christian Ward, James Stokoe, Al Ewing, Phil Hester, Juni Ba and others beyond the core team.
They’re accumulated more than 37,000 subscribers over the four and a half years they’ve been on Substack, and now they’ll reach even more people, as Dark Horse will bring the entire digital archive to comic shops and bookstores as periodicals and graphic novels. They’ve also recently launched their own web app to complement their Substack, and will soon launch a website as well.
“We always knew bringing these books to retail was a part of that next phase,” the team posted on Substack. “Dark Horse have been incredible partners to us in that effort so far, they care deeply about the quality of these books and making sure they resonate within the market. We couldn’t be happier about this collaboration with them.”
The series is a classic space opera set across a distant solar system of three habitable worlds and three moons, each with its own cultures, religions, economies and technology, chronicling an interstellar war between the forces of order and chaos. Rather than following a single narrative, the project encompasses multiple short comics, anthology series and serialized strips offering different entry points into the world, with contributions from
Foundations, written by Hickman and Spencer and illustrated by Del Mundo and Huddleston, introduces astronaut and explorer Tajo Vallar, whose doomed expedition to a dormant moon reignites the ancient conflict at the heart of the universe. The one-shot is presented in a prestige magazine-sized format and priced at $6.99. Dark Horse said additional projects featuring Ward, Stokoe, Ba, Steve Epting and Tini Howard, among others, will be announced soon.