Black Crown, IDW Publishing's imprint headed by former Vertigo editor Shelly Bond, will expand with two new series, announced Friday night at Emerald City Comic Con at the Black Crown: The Ruling Class panel.
Euthanauts is a new ongoing series from writer Tini Howard and artist Nick Robles, and tackles the always fertile theme of death -- specifically, what happens after we die. House Amok is a five-issue miniseries from writer Christopher Sebela and artist Shawn McManus, and described as "equal parts bloody reality, dark conspiracy, and magical fantasy."
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IDW's official description of Euthanauts reads, "Two women aim to find out in this series which combines classically intrepid explorers with our anxieties about death and the beyond -- with psychonautic mindspaces to match." House Amok is described as, "Delve into a character-driven study of a damaged nuclear family as we follow twin sisters in a claustrophobic, high-speed American road trip from Portland to the east coast."
"Euthanauts is a book about death and dying as a universal concept," Howard is quoted in IDW's press release. "How do these ideas contribute to our relationship with a deathspace we haven't yet discovered, and what's behind the light at the end of the tunnel?" Euthanauts is Howard's second Black Crown series, following Assassinistas, illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez.
"Horror was always my first true love affair with stories," Sebela said in the release. "Getting to team up with people like Shawn, Shelly, Lee, and Aditya to do a dark, creepy story like House Amok full of all the things that put me on edge and keep me up at night -- is everything I could’ve hoped for when I was being terrified by stories like this when I was a kid."
The Black Crown imprint was first announced at least year's ECCC, as a series of comics unified by both Bond's distinct creative aesthetic as seen in her celebrated run as an editor for more than years at Vertigo (from 1993 to 2016), and a shared fictional space -- a street that includes the "Black Crown pub." The imprint launched in October with Kid Lobotomy by Peter Milligan and Tess Fowler.