Thursday was spent almost entirely in panels, with brief breaks for cosplay photos! Check out the photos from what we saw today, and stay tuned for more once we’ve edited our interviews!
Thursday Cosplay
IDW’s Dark Spaces
At the panel, Scott Snyder said the idea behind the Dark Spaces anthology is to give people the room to tell the stories they want to tell, to feature up and coming writers and artists, and have licensing and ownership deals for those creations that are more welcoming than in other areas of the industry.
The anthology begins with Wildfire, which came about when Snyder learned about and research women in the California penal system who are part of the forestry service, being paid $2 a day to protect unbelievably lavish homes. He felt their story is a microcosm about much of the world today. He said it’s different from what he’s used to, it’s not monsters or vampires or kaoji, but something grounded. A bit of a heist story too.
The artist for this story, Hayden Sherman, said it was more researched than his sci fi work, which usually lets you make up what you think objects or environments look like. For this it was necessary to research what inmate fire fighters look like, their equipment, and the mechanics of a wildfire.
The next story, Good Deeds, is out in 2023, written by Che Grayson with art by Kelsey Ramsay. The official PR from IDW is here:
Good Deeds tells a haunting story of historical sins and a supernatural legend out for revenge. When teenager Cheyenne Collins and her mother move to St. Augustine, Florida, on the eve of the town’s anniversary, the community begins to die off one by one and a disgraced journalist steps in to seize the story and redeem her career. As the women are drawn together in the investigation, they uncover the town’s violent obsession with its founding mythology and the Fountain of Youth, as well as their own roles in the reckoning to come.
Another series, True Kult, started out with a different publisher, and was in the midst of crowd finding when IDW reached out and supported it. According to the panelists, it’s about dirtbags and fast food, a supernatural fast food heist, and it’s weird, dark, and really funny.
Crashing is a doctor who works with super powered people, and it also gets into trauma and addiction. Dead Seas tells a story of capturing ghosts and putting them out to sea and “of course nothing goes wrong.”
Earthdivers takes place in 2112, during the apocalypse, where a group of indigenous survivors find a time travel portal and decide to go back to 1492 and kill Christopher Columbus. There are a lot of twists and turns and a tragic love story too.
Sin Bin is about a hockey playing dad who hunts demons at night, Golgotha Motor Mountain is about a redneck motor massacre and two meth-cooking brothers, Arca is about a ship that leaves earth to establish a new colony, and The Hunger and the Dusk is a complex fantasy series that was pitched as as “the hot orc book.”
More about all the series can be found here.
Hasbro Product Reveal Panel
DC’s Dark Crisis Panel
The biggest takeaway from the panel is that the full title of the event isn’t just “Dark Crisis.” (The name is in the photos.) It should be interesting: with Marvel jumping headfirst into the multiverse, it makes sense that DC is going in a similar direction.