New York Comic-Con 2013 has brought us a couple of video-game-to-comics news items out of Dark Horse Comics. Firstly, the popular EVE Online MMPORG from CCP games will get its first graphic novel with EVE: True Stories, as well as a 184-page sourcebook for the universe of both EVE and Dust 514, appropriately entitled EVE: The Source. Both of these will be out in March.
EVE: True Stories will be written by Daniel Way of Wolverine, Deadpool and Thunderbolts fame, and it’s worth noting he also plotted the recent Deadpool video game. He’ll be depicting actual in-game player-driven events with help from artists Alejandro Aragon (Overlook, 28 Days Later), Tomm Coker (Daredevil Noir, Near Death), Federico Dallocchio (Batman: Arkham Unhinged, Suicide Squad), Dave Ross (Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga) and Mark McKenna (Star Wars: The Old Republic). This includes what Dark Horse terms “one of the greatest gaming stories of the last decade: the fall of the player alliance known as the Band of Brothers. In the early hours of February 5, 2009, one spy single-handedly destroyed the dominant Band of Brothers alliance and brought an end to the Great War, one of the larger and most significant player conflicts in the history of EVE Online. The first story arc of EVE: True Stories is a dramatized account of the action, intrigue and skullduggery that dismantled the galaxy-sprawling superpower.”
Yeah, that’s a hell of a triumph for gamers, to have your efforts immortalized in graphic novel form, but does it compare to Leeroy Jenkins?
Also from Dark Horse will be a team-up with Keiji Inafune and Team Ninja for a digital-comic series based on Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, with writers Tim Seeley and Josh Emmons and artist Rafael Ortiz. Also, they will be free downloads revealing bits of the upcoming game, and then a print version will accompany the game’s release in early 2014. What’s the game about? Well, you are Yaiba, a ninja cyborg fighting zombies. You don’t need to know more.
UPDATE: Yet another game has partnered with Dark Horse for comics, but this time it’s the CD Projekt RED RPG The Witcher. Writer Paul Tobin, artist Joe Querio and cover artist Dave Johnson will bring new stories from the game setting which was inspired by a series of novels. A new next-gen console game called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is due out in 2014, which makes this partnership advantageous to both sides.
Here’s the synopsis blurb: “Traveling near the edge of the Black Forest, in the land of the Angren, monster hunter Geralt meets a widowed man whose dead and murderous wife resides in an eerie mansion known as the House of Glass, a place of endless rooms where horror waits around every corner. Geralt will have to use all his witcher prowess to solve the manor’s mystery and survive.”
