“AfterDark” Horror Anthology coming to AfterShock Comics this October

Main cover by Tony Harris

Incentive cover by Szymon Kudranski

This October, just in time for Halloween, AfterShock Comics are launching “AfterDark”, a brand new prestige format horror anthology featuring stories from some of the best creators in the business today.

Here’s the official blurb:

Tales from the Crypt meets The Twilight Zone—four tales of horror, lost souls and things that go bump in the night.

A prestige format “One-Shock” featuring top creative talent just in time for the most horrific month of the calendar year, AFTERDARK is a collection of tales you’ll want to read with the lights on! A disparate tale from a possible future; a chance encounter with a mythical Black-Eyed Kid, a children’s fable gone awry; and a gut-wrenching last meal at the local diner.

These horrific, bone-chilling tales are conceived and written by Cullen Bunn, Jim Starlin, Joe Pruett and Frank Tieri and drawn by Cliff Richards, Nikkol Jelenic, Szymon Kudranski and Joe Eisma.

And to help whet your appetite, here’s each of the four writers to tell you a little bit about their own contribution to the anthology:

Cullen Bunn: “Dust to Dust is a bittersweet sort of horror tale, a story of love and loss and undying commitment, both to the fleeting time we have left on this earth, and the time we’ll have in whatever’s next.”

Frank Tieri: “We did a story for the Shock anthology called Little Red Hood, which was essentially the little red riding hood story as if it was told by Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese. In that story, Red was a drug courier, Grandma was a drug dealer, the Wolf was a rival drug lord, ‘Mother Goose’ was a mob boss called Don Orca… anyway, you get the idea. As it turned out, it was one of the more popular stories in that book so we thought hey, what the hell, why not do more? Why not play in that whacked out universe again?

And so, we got the LRH band of Joe Eisma and Matt Herms back together for more tales that will ruin your childhood, bringing us to…’Along Came A Spider’, our little horror tale for the AfterDark anthology, yet another f#%&ed up twist on a classic fairy tale. In this one, we pick up with a certain Detective Muffet who’s on the trail of an elusive and deadly serial killer called The Spider. Needless to say, it’s very dark. It’s very creepy. It’s going to lead to some nightmares. And it might lead to even more than that, so stay tuned…”

Jim Starlin: “It’s a tale of catastrophic generational dissatisfaction set in a dystopian future. Lots of laughs.”

Joe Pruett: “It will be a stand-alone one-off story returning to the world of the BLACK-EYED KIDS, one of AfterShock’s first series, written by myself and drawn by original series artist Szymon Kudranski. We will see some familiar faces in the new story, but you do not have to have been a reader of the series to enjoy it. It’s new reader friendly.”

Featuring colours by Guy Major, a main cover by Tony Harris and an incentive variant from Szymon Kudranski, the 48-page AFTER DARK goes on sale on the 13th of October 2021, and we absolutely can’t wait!

The writer of this piece was: Craig Neilson-Adams (aka Ceej)
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