At long last, Ian Edginton and INJ Culbard‘s clockwork punk fantasy series Brass Sun will return to the pages of 2000 AD for its sixth series in September 2025. The critically acclaimed series had been absent since 2018.
Entitled Pavane, the new Brass Sun arc returns to the story of Wren and her mission to restore life to the dying Brass Sun at the heart of the clockwork Orrery of worlds. Not much is known about the new story arc at this stage, other than that there will be a time jump and the youthful main character will now be in her mid-20s.
Rebellion’s press release teases:
“The new run on Brass Sun will return to Wren’s story now she’s a little older, and in her mid-twenties. After all her experiences she’s withdrawn herself from the world – but just as she tries to shut the rest of the world out, an old friend returns with a message: destiny isn’t done with her yet!”
Talking about the long absence and sudden return, series writer and co-creator Ian Edginton explained:
“The first run of Brass Sun was a great success, people really took to it, so much so that I started to doubt that I could repeat it with the next run. It was genuinely a case of performance anxiety! I was worried that it wouldn’t measure up, so I kept putting it off and putting it off.
“Eventually [INJ Culbard] and I went on to do other things and Brass Sun lay fallow for years. But about eighteen months ago my teenage daughter read the whole thing and was annoyed that there wasn’t anymore, that I’d just left poor Wren hanging in limbo. I reread it myself and realised she was right and what’s more I wanted to finish telling Wren’s story, I owed it to her. I also realised that I needed to get over myself and just get on with it and so here we are!”
He adds,
“It’s great to be working with Ian again. I’d forgotten how much of a laugh it was. We’d start off talking over the story and script and then end up debating whether you could build a submarine out of Tofu and could a spider ride a Moped? We’re a pair of unsupervised middle aged men with far too much time on our hands!”
Brass Sun debuted in the pages of the British weekly anthology in 2012. It ran for five series before an extended hiatus after the conclusion of the Engine Summer arc in 2018. The first three series were collected in a deluxe hardcover edition in 2014, and Rebellion had republished the first arc in US format floppies that same year. The fourth and fifth arcs, Motor Head (Prog 1950-1959) and Engine Summer (Prog 2061-2072), remain uncollected, but the digital editions of the original issues are available on the 2000 AD webshop for eager fans.
During the extended hiatus both co-creators have remained busy. Series artist INJ Culbard teamed up with Dan Abnett to create the enormously popular and acclaimed science fiction procedural Brink. Ian Edginton meanwhile released new series of Scarlet Traces, Helium (both with frequent artistic collaborator D’Israeli) and the continuation of classic 2000 AD series Fiends of the Eastern Front with Tiernen Trevallion.
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