More details about King in Black, Marvel Entertainment’s next big comic book event, have started to emerge with the publisher announcing that December won’t just see the first issues of the eponymous central series, but also an additional four new launches and two tie-in issues.
King in Black spins out of Marvel’s ongoing Venom series and its earlier spin-off, Absolute Carnage, and focuses on an invasion of Earth by Knull, the ancient deity who is, as it turns out, the evil royalty of the storyline’s title — and the entity behind the creation of Venom’s alien symbiote race. Indeed, the sales listing for the first issue of the core title teases “an army of hundreds of thousands of symbiote dragons,” as if to emphasize the scale of his villainy.
The central series, announced in July, launches with two issues in December as creators Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman expand the story they launched together more than two years earlier in the first issues of the Venom series. The December issue of that series, by Cates and artist Iban Coello, is one of the tie-in releases for the month, alongside that month’s Spider-Woman, by Karla Pacheco and Pere Pérez.
Beyond those four issues, Marvel has a raft of new titles debuting in December to tie into the storyline, with a new Black Cat series, by Jed Mackay and C.F. Villa, accompanying three launches bearing the name of the storyline itself: King in Black: Immortal Hulk, King in Black: Iron Man/Doctor Doom, and King in Black: Namor, the latter of which releases two issues that month.
King in Black runs five issues, as per Marvel, suggesting more tie-ins and spin-offs will be released in the coming months.
