Dark Horse Comics today announced that Amelia Cole writers Adam P. Knave and DJ Kirkbride will reunite with artist Nick Brokenshire for The Once and Future Queen, a five-issue miniseries launching in March.
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Characterized as “a twenty-first-century King Arthur adventure,” The Once and Future Queen will bring the Amelia Cole creative team together with letterer Frank Cvetovic, one of Knave’s collaborators on Artful Daggers.
The Once and Future Queen centers on Rani Arturus, who starts the story on a trip to the United Kingdom to compete in a chess championship. The multiethnic teen girl finds herself immersed in magic and mystery after she encounters the legendary sword Excalibur. With the support of a surprisingly modern Merlin, Rani must fight to become the queen humankind has been waiting for.
“Arthurian legend is such an incredibly rich playground to work in, so we decided to utilize the core concept, but give it some twists and turns, updating it to reflect today’s world, not yesterday’s,” said The Once and Future Queen writers Adam P. Knave and D.J. Kirkbride in a statement. “We each seem to gravitate toward stories that reflect the world in terms of diversity and structure, while still loving old myth and finding new ways to bring it forward.”
That’s some DNA that the series shares not only with Amelia Cole, which gave a new twist on stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, but also Knave’s latest project, a prose novel called This Starry Deep.
“Most pulp has been obsessed with the middle of the story: you have that Buck Rogers, that Flash Gordon, and you have that middle of the story where they’re just awesome heroes and they’re really good at what they do,” Knave told ComicBook.com of This Starry Deep, which follows a retired couple who had been adventurers in their youth. “It’s something I love, too, Lord knows, but it’s competency porn. But there’s two ends that peopel don’t tend to do, which is the beginnings — here’s this pulp hero, and he’s not too good at it yet — and the ending — here’s this pulp hero, at the end….It’s not so much the call to action, which would be kind of a standard journey, but at this point the call to action is sick of you not picking up.”
The Once and Future Queen‘s first issue goes on sale March 8, 2017.
