Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Sure, sure, you’ve heard about Buffy coming back to Dark Horse for “Season 8,” continuing in comics where the television series left off. But think of Buffy as the tip of a dark iceberg, a frozen mass filled with horror that’s slowly thawing.

Okay - Flowery speech aside, we’re talking about Dark Horse’s upcoming line of horror titles that will, effectively, be giving the publisher a shot in the arm when it comes to creepy comic books and graphic novels.

“The books just started showing up,” Dark Horse’s Scott Allie, editor of the impromptu line of horror titles said when asked what the impetus for revving things up was. “The horror line was never supposed to go away; it’s just that there was less happening. I had been distracted focusing on Conan for a long time. Steve Niles was doing a lot of stuff for other publishers. Mike Mignola and I found ourselves waiting a long time for Hellboy: Darkness Calls, and The Goon went on hiatus for Eric to work on Chinatown. But then by the middle of last year, Niles was coming back to Dark Horse, we had Duncan Fegredo revving things up on Hellboy, and a bunch of new books were starting to get mapped out for this year. Joss was relaunching Buffy with us ... and it looked like a major critical mass of horror comics were gonna be happening in the first part of 2007. Which is really how the line started in 2003-we just had a lot of horror books in the works, and decided to make a concerted effort, and show people what Dark Horse could do with the genre. I wish I never let the horror line slide from view at all, but things come in cycles, naturally.”

We asked Allie to run things down a little...

Rex Mundi: “The ongoing bimonthly series, with issue #4 in February bringing back the worst villain, the Man in White, for a bloody showdown with Julien,” Allie said. “This book is increasing in mainstream appeal in part because of the news of the film in development with Johnny Depp and Dark Horse Entertainment. This was a long time in the making, with Johnny having been shepherding it for years before announcing it this fall. Volume 4 (of 6) wraps with Dark Horse’s #5 in April, with both heroes and villain reaching all time lows, suffering terrible defeats. By February, three volumes of trade paperbacks will be on bookshelves, marking the halfway of point of this epic series.”

Steve Niles: “Steve came back to Dark Horse in 2006, but comes back with a bang in 2007 with City of Others - a new series with Bernie Wrightson, as well as a new Criminal Macabre [previously Cal McDonald] push. There will be plenty of others, with the most recent one to get signed up is Earth Vs. Monsters, with Nat Jones, his collaborator on The Nail and Giant Monster. Earth Vs. Monsters was something Steve pitched me when we first started working together, but we didn’t have an artist. It’s a big, crazy, explosive thing. A catastrophe in the tradition of the 1950s horror/sf movies. It should be a lot of fun. We just got a budget for the book, so it’s still quite a ways off, but we’re going to start soon. And Steve has a bunch of other things in the works. There’s probably going to be another big horror line push near the end of 2007, and he’ll have some new stuff then.”

Buffy: “Of course, one of our biggest events of the year is the new launch of Buffy in March, overseen by Joss Whedon, who’s writing the first, middle, and last arc. The second series, after Joss’s initial four, is going to feature Faith, and it’ll be written by Brian K. Vaughan. We’re real jazzed about that. Brian’s the most exciting your writer on the scene for me-Ex Machina’s my favorite book right now, which led us to using Tony [Harris] on covers for Conan for a while. So having Brian follow Joss really cuts the pain of not having Joss write the whole thing himself. After that, Jeph Loeb will be on the book, and some writers from the show-so we’re getting the best possible people to run this series. Working with Joss opens doors.”

Hellboy: “With a new Hellboy movie going into production, we’re stepping up publishing, getting a bunch of series rolling that we’ve been promising for years. Abe Sapien gets a miniseries written by Mike and drawn by Jason Alexander [Damn Nation]. Also, a series featuring Lobster Johnson and the B.P.R.D. in the 1940s cleaning up Nazi occult experiments will launch later in the year. A contemporary BPRD series by Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis continue, with Garden of Souls launching in March and a follow-up focusing on Captain Daimio follows immediately in August. Meanwhile, the main event is Hellboy: Darkness Calls launching in April by Mignola and Duncan Fegredo.”

The Goon: Eric Powell returns to his creation with the outrageous, nearly censored "Satan’s Baby," featuring a story that has the business offices shaking in their boots. This will be followed by the return of the bimonthly series, and the long awaited Chinatown original graphic novel, to which Eric has hinted since the start of The Goon.”

Mike Richardson: “Mike is writing two new horror series this year-the creepy teen screamer The Secret, and the upbeat zombie apocalypse story, Living with the Dead. I think Mike just got the itch. He makes movies, publishes comics, supervises things, is always rewriting things, and I think he just missed the intimacy of doing a comic where you write it from the bottom up and no one else come in and monkeys too much. Producing some of Steve Niles’s movies got him excited about horror, and he started getting ideas. So instead of hiring someone to write them, which he might have done five years ago, I guess he just wanted to write them himself.”

Original graphic novels: “In January, we see the release of Blessed Thistle and The Messengers, two original graphic novels in the horror line. The former is Steve Morris’s winner for the 2005 New Recruits contest, a bizarre psychological yarn for fans of David Lynch. The Messengers is Sam Raimi’s upcoming film told from an entirely different perspective, by Jason Hall [Beware the Creeper].

“Basically, when looking at the line, I want a lot of variety, because I think the genre lends itself to that. But in general I want smart stuff that uses the medium to best advantage, being colorful and dynamic-in terms of having some good loud stuff that you want to see a guy draw-and has some humor in it. I get a little bored with horror stuff if it’s just entirely somber and takes itself too seriously. There’s got to be some tension between wallowing in the weird stuff, and showing how it can be a little funny, or that people’s reactions can be funny. And we want real good art-the line tends to be sort of art driven. Not to discredit our writers, but the art determines a lot of the character of the individual books, and we want artists who can deliver the mood, rather than expecting a superhero artist to create atmosphere.

“So that’s what the start of the year looks like. Some of the projects I mentioned go out a little further, but basically it all revs up from January to April - it’ll be a good time to like horror comics.”