Aabria Iyengar + Mari Costa team up for the magical coming-of-age story ‘The Fade’

The new miniseries from BOOM! Studios begins in November.

Professional TTRPG gamemaster and podcaster Aabria Iyengar is teaming with Belle of the Ball artist Mari Costa for a new miniseries coming from BOOM! Studios’ BOOM! Box imprint. The Fade is about a college freshman in a world where people can pass over into a fantasy realm called The Fade while they sleep.

The Fade is my love letter to everyone that dreams of who they might be in a wilder, more fantastical world as a way of figuring out who they want to be in this one,” said Iyengar. “The dream is the first step. Keep going!”

Iyengar has made a name as not only a professional gamemaster for tabletop role-playing games, but overall as a great storyteller and improv talent. She is the gamemaster for the webseries Dimension 20: Misfits & Magic, which returns for a second season later this month. Costa is the artist of graphic novels like Belle of the Ball from First Second and the Demon of Beausoleil, and also the author of the forthcoming novel Shoestring Theory.

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Slugfest | ‘Summer of Symbiotes’ leads to ‘Death of the Venomverse’

Plus: Marvel Artist’s Editions, Dark Horse graphic novels, Spider-Verse, variant covers and more!

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

Marvel has revealed more details and a teaser image for Summer of Symbiotes, something they teased last October along with several other events for 2023. It’s less of a single-story crossover and more of a moniker they are using to describe a whole bunch of different symbiote-themed series, miniseries and events.

While many of the events teased on the image we’ve heard of before, like Carnage Reigns and Extreme Venomverse, there is one new one listed — Death of the Venomverse, which echoes the Death of the Spiderverse storyline we’re seeing in Spider-Man.

Here’s the description from Marvel:

It’s all leading to this! The epic adventures above are spiraling towards an explosive destination, and not all of your favorite symbiotes will survive the journey. The Carnage symbiote is more bloodthirsty than ever and heads to the multiverse for its greatest killing spree yet. But what is it after? Find out more when this upcoming limited series is announced at the Marvel Comics: Spider-Man & the Venomverse Panel at C2E2 2023!

C2E2 is coming up this weekend. Here’s the full teaser image:

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Mail Call | The Avengers brace for ‘World War She-Hulk’

Plus: More news and announcements from Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, AfterShock, Top Cow, Skybound and more!

Mail Call is a roundup of the announcements we’ve received from comics publishers in our mailboxes recently that we haven’t already covered. Hit the links for more information.

Marvel is dusting off a classic event title for an upcoming Avengers storyline — “World War She-Hulk,” which references the popular “World War Hulk” story from 2007.

The new storyline will find She-Hulk declared a global menace, so the Winter Guard decides to bring her in.

“When the Russian Winter Guard invade Avengers Mountain to arrest She-Hulk, it sets off a global espionage adventure that takes us from the notorious assassin training academy of the Red Room to an undersea kingdom on the verge of violent revolution,” said writer Jason Aaron. “Along the way, traitors will fall, regimes will crumble and the dark evolution of Jennifer Walters will reach its bloody red crescendo, all as we build toward the epic events of Avengers #50.”

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‘Die’ wins a British Fantasy Award

The awards recognize fantasy and horror lit across a variety of categories.

Die, Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ series about a group of teens sucked into a role-playing game, has won a 2020 British Fantasy Award.

“This is an amazing honour. Stephanie and I are totally humbled,” Gillen said on Twitter.

The British Fantasy Awards recognize fantasy and horror literature across a range of categories, including the “Best Comic/Graphic Novel” category. You can see the complete list of winners across all categories here. You can also see the full awards presentation on YouTube.

Other nominees in the comics category this year included 2000AD, Basketful of Heads, B.P.R.D. The Devil You Know, Vol. 3: Ragna Rok, DCeased and The Ozone Diary.

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Role play as a role player in the ‘Die’ RPG

Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ comic about role-playing games naturally gets its own RPG.

If you’ve been Die-ing (sorry) to play the role-playing game at the center of Kieron Gillen and the amazing Stephanie HansDie comic book, you are now in luck — a beta version of the Die RPG is now available on the Die website.

The materials include a manual, character sheets and additional gamemaster materials, with something called the “Arcana” — “weird stuff and supplementary material” — coming with the next arc of the comic.

“It’s a somewhat meta RPG which is designed to let a group of players make their own version of the first arc of Die,” Gillen said in his email newsletter. “It’s about Die the situation rather than the specifics of Die. As in, you generate a group of real world people, who then sit down to play a role-playing game, before getting dragged into a fantasy world. Yes, it’s a little Meta. One of the playtesters described it as a manual of how to make your own Kieron Gillen-esque story, which I quite like. There’s a lot of me trying to explain how stories work, and how DIE works specifically. That means I suspect some of it will be interesting to folks who have no interest in RPGs at all. There are also at least three funny jokes.”

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Goth Jumanji: Gillen + Hans team for new series ‘Die’

Fantasy gets real this December from Image Comics.

Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, who previously worked together on Marvel’s Journey into Mystery, are rolling the dice on a new comic this December called “Die.” Clayton Clowes will letter the project.

“Stephanie and I have been wanting to work together forever – Journey Into Mystery 645 is one of my favourite things I’ve ever done, and this comes straight from there,” Gillen said in his weekly email newsletter. “The Earth needs a fantasy world created by Stephanie Hans, and I had to enable it.”

The story revolves around a group of teens who regularly play tabletop role-playing games. One night they mysteriously disappear, only to reappear two years later. Actually, forget my explanation — you can read this for yourself on this lovely, handy teaser the team put together:

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