For those that love good comics, I hope you’ve read Greg Rucka’s “Queen & Country.” This espionage book is straight up amazing, with one of the best leads in recent comic memory in Tara Chace. It’s featured phenomenal artists throughout, with people like Steve Rolston, Brian Hurtt and Mike Hawthorne, and many fans have been eagerly awaiting its return.
Now, thanks to an interview Rucka did with the New York Post’s comic blog Parallel Worlds, we now know it will be returning some time in the summer of 2014…hopefully.
While little is known about it so far, as Rucka said the story and script haven’t been written yet nor has there been an announced artist to date, the prospect of a return of Chace and her fellow Minders is one worth celebrating. Look for more on that here as we get it, and take a look at what Rucka had to say about it over at the New York Post below.
You get asked this so often that it’s part of a FAQ on your web site, but what’s going on with new “Queen and Country.” The web site says “2011.”
Rucka: I have to update that. We are looking at summer 2014. It will pick up on the status quo that was established at the end of the last “Queen and Country” novel called “The Last Run.” This will be Oni Press. “Queen and Country” will be back in comic form.
What’s taken so long?
Rucka: There were a couple of things. The first was that I had an agreement with a certain artist that she would be the one to draw that first arc. But then that artist kept taking exclusives at the Big Two. So I went back and forth trying to make it happen.
The second was that the biggest problem I’ve had with “Queen and Country” is that it ties so tightly to the real world that physical passage of time is a real problem. I’ve been wrestling with it all along. How am I going to negotiate the fact that these people need to be getting older, but it takes so long between arcs and a lot of what makes it work is its topicality or its appearance of topicality and that requires a fair amount of heavy lifting.
The research on “Queen and Country” was always three to four times the amount of research on anything else, and I’m a research guy. I research the hell out of what I’m doing. So those were the bigger factors.
Has the new series been written?
Rucka: No. I’ve got the operation name, and I know the character details. But again: Here we are in … 2013, and it’s a matter of figuring out what’s going to be going on in June 2014 that will make this remotely relevant. I still haven’t found that yet. Where and who?
