Cullen Bunn and Christopher Mitten unite for folk horror comic THE AUTUMN KINGDOM

Horror master Cullen Bunn and visionary of the weird Christopher Mitten have never worked together on a horror comic. A cosmic flaw in the universe, if you ask me. Fortunately, this oversight has been righted with the announcement of their new comic The Autumn Kingdom, a 4-issue folk horror comic to be published by Oni Press about a family that gets consumed by a dark Swedish forest that houses myths and stories with evil intentions.

Here’s the official synopsis from the press release:

“Bestselling author Andrew Kier found the perfect place to finish his latest dark-fantasy novel—an idyllic, remote cabin on the edge of a lush Swedish forest. His young daughters, Sommer and Winter, gleefully explore…until they happen upon a strange clearing of ancient statues: goblins, dwarves, elves, and a warrior queen mysteriously missing her swordhand and weapon. When something sinister follows the girls home and viciously snatches their parents in the night, the sisters’ only hope may be that ancient relic, lost in the forest underbrush, waiting for a new champion to take it up…”

It can easily be argued that Bunn is the Stephen King of comics. The breadth of his work, which ranges from quiet and personal horror (The Empty Man) to dark lore-heavy epics (Hollow Country), covers most that the genre has to offer. And just when you think he’s done everything he can within it, he finds other ways to terrify with concepts and ideas that take the familiar into unconventional places (like the amazing Bone Parish, which mixes drugs, the supernatural, and New Orleans spiritualism). Clearly, there’s always more enough reason to be excited when a new Cullen Bunn project is announced.

Mitten, on the other hand, has taken to the world of Hellboy and the BPRD with a style that features a curious blend of realism and fantasy. His approach to worldbuilding and character design accentuates the mundane so that the paranormal elements at play can disrupt it to greater effect. It allows for a different take on dark fantasy that lures readers in with a false sense of security destined to be shattered once strange things are welcomed into our reality.

Below you’ll find an exclusive excerpt of The Autumn Kingdom #1. The book will release wherever comics are sold on September 4^th, 2024.

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