Locke & Key Creators To Reunite For Tales From The Darkside Comic Series

Locke & Key creative team Joe Hill (NOS4A2, Wraith) and Gabriel Rodríguez (Onyx) will launch a new series from IDW Publishing this summer, the publisher revealed at ComicsPro in Los Angeles today.

Tales from the Darkside sees the Eisner Award-winning team reunite on a comic-book revival of the horror anthology TV series of the same name. Rodríguez will provide cover art for the series, with Charles P. Wilson III (The Wraith) contributing variant covers.

The four-issue series will feature Hill's reimagining of Tales for a contemporary take on the cult classic. Structured to have the scope of Locke & Key while exploring a vast, underlying mythology, Tales aims to unfold a cohesive universe made up of individual issues.

According to the creative team, these stories will draw inspiration from the TV series that it has spawned from while also taking a meta approach to the material.

"This is the show that could've been," said Hill in a statement. "The original Tales from the Darkside was a fun, bleak little spin on the Twilight Zone style anthology. My idea is to give readers a little more. Every story is meant to stand alone, but gradually, you will come to see how they all connect, to tell a single larger story."

"The universe that Joe is building here is wholly unique while still doing justice to the original show," said Tales from the Darkside editor Michael Benedetto. "And having Gabriel collaborating with him again is the best we could have possibly hoped for. These guys have a proven track record, and this series will only serve to build on their reputations as excellent storytellers and masters of horror and suspense."

Ironically, the original TV series came about as a result of the success of Creepshow, an anthology horror film from Tales From the Darkside creator and horror icon Stephen King, who is Hill's father. King even contributed a story to each the Tales From The Darkside series and its feature-film follow-up. For his part, Hill himself appeared in Creepshow at age 9.

Both Creepshow and Tales From the Darkside were strongly influenced by EC Comics of the pre-Comics Code era.

You can find Tales From the Darkside starting this June at your local comic shop.