Welcome back to Dark Horse Unleashed, a special feature here at CraveOnline that focuses exclusively on Dark Horse Comics!
For almost thirty years, Dark Horse Comics has published a diverse array of creator owned comics including Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Frank Miller’s Sin City & 300, and Eric Powell’s The Goon alongside licensed comics featuring Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Aliens, Predator, Prometheus, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Halo, Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
For this installment of Dark Horse Unleashed, Editor-in-Chief Scott Allie clairifies the end of Hellboy rumors and speaks about the return of Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy before sharing his favorite moments from Archie vs. Predator and Fight Club. Scott also talks about the return of Barb Wire and King Tiger in addition to Jonathan Case’s The New Deal and Dark Horse’s comic convention plans for the summer.
The official Dark Horse Unleashed artwork seen above was drawn by Michael Avon Oeming and colored by Dave Stewart.
CraveOnline: Both Barb Wire and King Tiger are getting a comeback later this year. You’ve already revived Ghost and X, so does this mean that more characters from Comics’ Greatest World come back as well?
Scott Allie: These are the only two in the works right now. The original creators of these two characters, Chris [Warner] and Randy [Stradley], were involved with the X and Ghost relaunches, but in this case they’re really driving the projects, each of them writing the character they created, each editing the other.
Will Barb Wire and King Tiger share continuity with the other titles?
There’s no tie in to the other recent relaunches, no plans for crossovers the way Ghost and X and Captain Midnight all met up. We’re just launching these two as their own books, telling tight stories with both, and we’ll see where it goes.
The classic Comics’ Greatest World also had some really top notch talent on those books. Will there be new editions of those stories reprinted this year?
All that stuff is available in omnibuses, which is a good way to keep a ton of material out there. But we’re not doing new packaging or anything—the older material, the preexisting stories aren’t important to what we’re launching this summer.
I saw that Fight Club 2 is listed as an ongoing in the July solicits. Is that correct?
Nope. Ten issues.
Since we last spoke, Hellboy Beer has been released. What is it about Hellboy that makes him so well suited for these kinds of tie-in products?
Just such a great, fun, iconic design, and a fun name. You can tell a pretty simple story around the Beast of the Apocalypse that can lend itself to a lot of things. Who doesn’t want to drink the Right Hand of Doom?
In our last column, you mentioned that Hellboy and B.P.R.D. are nearing their endgames. But would that preclude you and Mike Mignola and John Arcudi from revisiting the unseen past of these characters again?
Well, we’re moving toward the conclusion, but I think Mike and I maybe have overstated that lately. It’s still years before it ends, but the end is getting really clear to the three of us. As we’re doing that, though, we are digging into the past more and more. The recent Frankenstein launch takes us back to 1956, and even further back in terms of some of the stuff Frankenstein discovers there.
And we have more Lobster Johnson and Witchfinder on the way. Just today Mike and I came up with a few projects we want to do that will take us further into the past. There’s a lot to explore there. There will come a day when there’s no more present day stories to tell, but yeah, we’ll definitely continue to explore the past of the world, as we have done.
On that note, will there be a Hellboy and The B.P.R.D. 1953?
It’s in the works!
I would love to hear more about Jonathan Case’s The New Deal, which has been a long time in the making.
It’s really beautiful. Jonathan is a great cartoonist, great writer, the whole package. With this he’s evoking this amazing period, in the thirties—it’s brisk and bristling with life, fast paced—more the version of it we know from the fiction and film of the time than real life—except that Jonathan provides realistic portrayals of the minority characters.
The brisk light pace does this hard stop a few dozen pages in when timely issues of race pop up, and we start to delve into the crime caper at the heart of the story. Jonathan has done two very different crime books for us, with The Creep and Green River Killer—and this one is yet another total departure within that genre. In a lot of ways far more lighthearted, but with very serious moments, and very serious commentary.
Regarding your writing retreat with Gerard Way, is Umbrella Academy 3 on the horizon? And is there any word about an adaptation of Umbrella Academy?
No word on an adaptation, but there are constant talks, have been for many years now, and there’s always new life coming to it. But as for the comics, the retreat was entirely focused on Umbrella Academy—mostly on series three, which will still be called Hotel Oblivion, as announced a few years ago now. I say mostly on series three, because we also spent some time looking out at the big beats spread across the subsequent miniseries. Gerard has a big plan for this book, always has seen it fairly clearly from the beginning to end, and on this trip we were really cognizant of the long term pieces that need to fall into place.
The Hotel Oblivion story has evolved a lot. Gerard’s bursting with ideas for how we can meet and try to exceed the expectations the first two books set up. He and I had another retreat a couple years ago here in Portland, but it didn’t bear as much fruit, hence no comic … We weren’t in the right head space, and the week was sort of ruined by something that happened in the world that really derailed us, which I don’t want to trivialize by mentioning. We’d tried before to get Hotel Oblivion going, and we didn’t manage to do it, but the retreat this time could not have gone better.
We hid out in a hotel for three days, did nothing but work on the story, and Gerard’s has a great outline and he’s working on the first script. Gabriel Bá is excited to get back into it, though he’s currently busy promoting Two Brothers and with his work with Matt Fraction. But he’ll be back, Dave Stewart will be back, Nate Piekos will be back. All of us have been dying to get back to this book—we all really value the teamwork that goes on between everyone involved. It’s a great thing to be a part of. Nate and Dave’s work on Umbrella led me to bring them together on Fight Club, and that book has also resulted in a sense of teamwork unlike many others. It’s too early to talk about a release date for Umbrella series three, but we are starting to look at schedules with Ba to make sure he has the time he needs to do his thing.
You recently mentioned that Dark Horse’s deal for creator owned comics had changed. Can you please elaborate on that?
The perception has been for a long time that if you did a creator owned deal with Dark Horse, you signed over your entertainment right. And while we have an entertainment division, those deals are separate. We’ve definitely made deals where it’s all tied in together, but we make a lot of deals where entertainment and other merchandise are totally separate. I mean, a lot of projects we do are licensed, video games and movies, and we don’t get ancillary rights on those, of course.
So we wanted to make it more formally clear to creators that if you want us to be your publisher, we can just be your publisher. But if you want to partner with us on the entertainment side, that can be a separate conversation, that can either take place at the time we sign the pub deal, or it can come up later. With Lady Killer, the deal was set up and the book solicited without any talk of entertainment rights, but later a conversation took place to partner on that front.
Now that we’re on the eve of release for Archie vs. Predator and Fight Club 2 # 1, can you share your favorite moments from the first issue of each series?
In AVP if I had to choose a moment, I guess it’s the Predator watching Bettie and Veronica fighting in the first issue. But I like how effectively Alex [de Campi] and the art team have given you a straightforward Archie comic, that goes really wrong at moments, then snaps back to feeling like Archie. That balance will tip over the course of the series.
My favorite moment in Fight Club 2 #1 is a bit of a gross out moment, when Cameron [Stewart] and Chuck [Palahniuk] deliver the worst Family Circus comic of all time, a circular panel in the center of a page early on where the heroes’ off spring has a box of something foul and the babysitter wonders about the smell.
Last question, which comic conventions will Dark Horse be at coming to in the first half of 2015?
Well, we’re well into con season now, it feels like. I moderated a few panels at C2E2 last week. I think we have a presence at Phoenix, and while our staff won’t be at Heroes we’re helping to push Harrow County there with Tyler Crook and Cullen Bunn in attendance. And of course we’re already gearing up for San Diego.
That’s all for this installment of Dark Horse Unleashed here at CraveOnline! But if you want to send us questions for the next Dark Horse Unleashed, you can tweet your questions to @BlairMarnell!
