Via The Wrap, Dark Horse Comics have announced “Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown,” an anthology of folklore-inspired fantasy tales, written and illustrated by Mike Mignola. The book, due out in November, will mark the first in Mignola’s new imprint Curious Objects, and a new shared universe he is creating with Ben Stenbeck (“Our Bones Dust,” “Baltimore”) called Lands Unknown.
Mignola comments, “It all started with an Italian folktale about a boy who goes bowling with corpses. I fell in love with the story as soon as I discovered it, but I wanted to play fast and loose when adapting it, so I created a whole new world. Not too different than our world a few centuries ago, but with a lot more gods and monsters. Once I created that world, new characters and stories just started pouring out of it.” Other familiar Mignola themes fans can expect will include the undead, the devil, pirates, and wizards.
Stenbeck says, “For a few years now Mike has been emailing me designs and pages and ideas and maps and lists of place names for this world, and his enthusiasm for this project is indomitable and infectious. So often my reaction to these emails is, ‘That’s great, Mike! But I still have two books to draw before I can even move on to this work!’ And then I find myself taking three days off to write a new story. Luckily, Mike likes my stories. My first project is set far off in a distant corner of this world. That way, I can’t bump into anything Mike is doing and make a mess.”
Lands Unknown will mark the third shared universe created by Mignola, after the largely concluded Hellboy Universe, and the Outerverse that spun out of “Baltimore.” It will kick off when “Bowling With Corpses,” colored by Dave Stewart and lettered by Clem Robins, is released in bookstores on November 5, and comic book shops the subsequent day.
