As announced by The Hollywood Reporter, AfterShock Comics will publish “Dead Kings,” a new series co-created by writer Steve Orlando (“Midnighter”) and artist Matthew Dow Smith (“Batman and Harley Quinn”), and featuring colors from Lauren Affe (“Spider-Gwen”) and letters by Thomas Mauer (“The Realm”). The new series will be what Orlando calls “post-post-apocalypse,” showing readers what happens after the end of the world. The book will debut this October.
The series, which Orlando calls the series “the biggest original series I’ve ever done,” follows Sasha Vasnetsov, who is trying to rescue his brother Gena from a work camp in this new uncertain world. Orlando explains that Sasha never really cared for his brother until he was captured and “now Sasha has promised to liberate his brother and return with him to their mother before the end of her fiftieth year. He’s going to need help, and he finds it in Maria Kamenaya, an abandoned iron soldier and survivor of the Great Iron War that almost killed the world.”
Described as “Russian Folklore to the tune of Blade Runner 2049,” “Dead Kings” arrives in comic book stores on October 24, 2018. Until then feast your eyes on some interior art and issue #1’s variant cover by “Jessica Jones” co-creator Michael Gaydos below:
