WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Friday #1 by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin and Munsta Vicente, available now.

The first issue of Friday dropped at Panel Syndicate on April 15 and promises to deliver a True Detective-esque mystery. It's already packed to the gills with Lovecraftian horror, occult, ritual sacrifice, madness, and an unseen-but-sure-to-be-terrifying figure known as The White Lady.

The titular character, Friday Fitzhugh, is thrust back into the detective world she left behind for college by her childhood best friend, Lancelot Jones. Along with the town Sheriff, they track a familiar foe -- Wilson "Weasel" Wadsworth -- who has, for some unknown reason, stolen an ancient dagger from an archaeological dig. This isn't typical Weasel behavior: Weasel's known for ripping off kids and selling pills, not stealing ancient daggers -- especially not an ancient, stone dagger that led the professor who found it to become sick just from touching the artifact.

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Trudging through the woods, Friday believes she sees a girl watching the trio from the dark of the forest and Lancelot remarks that they are close to Crescent Rock, a place of occult horror. In the dim past, the women of the forest would offer up the weakest of their offspring to their ancient gods. The child would wail in the dead of winter, waiting to be claimed by the gods to ensure the women a bountiful spring. Still, Lancelot dismisses Friday, because there have always been strange wanderings in the forest -- nothing has changed in Friday's absence except for her.

It's not that Friday and Lancelot haven't dealt with the strange and the macabre before, but Friday -- either because she's feeling the effects of growing up or because there is something particularly disturbing happening (or a touch of both) -- finds the whole caper sad.

Once they catch up to Weasel, he's almost unrecognizable. He's babbling to himself, foaming at the mouth and etching some sort of rune into the trunk of a tree. Friday stops his efforts with her patented ice-ball, but it sends him scurrying into the forest, where Friday gives chase and eventually knocks him out after an intense fight in the snow.

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Friday #1 interior art

In the cruiser, Weasel wakes up, dazed and still under some sort of possession. His words come out in fits, signifying some sort of augural surrounding the mysterious White Lady. If the similarities to True Detective's own Lovecraftian echoes haven't come through in stark enough terms, then recall the ritual rapes, torture, and murders of young women by The Yellow King's acolyte Errol Childress. Errol wasn't acting alone or as the progenitor of the rituals: He was initiated into an occult religion that had been part of his family for generations.

There's no indication as to whether this will be true of Weasel. He may a descendant of the women who gave up their children to the gods, or he may be part of some secretive cult that has kept the practice alive all these years. Weasel is the son of the richest man in King Hill, just as Errol came from a rich and powerful family in the bayou -- so the connection may be stronger than at first glance.

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The original incarnation of the Yellow King comes from Ambrose Bierce but became a part of the Lovecraft Cthulu mythology as Hastur, one of the Great Old Ones, a half-brother to Cthulu who lives in Carcosa. In True Detective, Carcosa is the labyrinthine structure made from sticks and branches Errol builds for ritual child sacrifice and sexual abuse. Child Rock appears to be the White Lady's Carcosa.

Despite the ritualized murder and the occult symbolism that pervaded True Detective, there was no monster except humanity. The White Lady will likely be an active entity within Friday and be an actual supernatural monster. As such, she will take her place amongst the Cthulu pantheon. Already it's been revealed that a pre-historic evil lurks in the forest, there's a magical dagger that can turn those who touch it into babbling maniacs and an as-yet-unseen primeval horror behind is it all. Friday, Lancelot and the rest of King's Hill are in for an existential horror of monstrous proportions.

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