Revealed in a report by The Hollywood Reporter, Anansi Boys is going to hit both the comics and TV world pretty soon. The 2005 best-seller is being adapted into an eight-issue miniseries by Dark Horse comics set for release on June 26th, 2024. The comic is available to pre-order at your LCS right now, while the live-action TV show on Amazon, has already wrapped up its casting and shooting. Neil Gaiman is serving as one of the showrunners of that adaptation much like his previous roles in showrunning TV series such as Netflix’s Sandman, along with Good Omens, also on Prime.
The Anansi Boys comic book will be adapted by film and comic book author Marc Bernardin, with artist Shawn Martinbrough on art, Chris Sotomayor on colors, and finally, Jim Campbell on letters. Issue one’s base cover will also be illustrated by the phenomenal talents of David Mack, with two variant covers by Martinbrough himself and Denys Cowan.
“To say that I’ve been a fan of Neil’s work for decades would be the understatement of all understatements,” said Bernardin in a public statement. “So to have the opportunity to help transmute his wonderful Anansi Boys to comics is a gobsmacking honor. I hope readers who love the novel encounter those moments they adore as well as discover some fresh madness to keep them on their toes.”
“Despite having many Neil Gaiman collections on my bookshelf, surprisingly I had never read The Anansi Boys,” added Martinbrough. “When Dark Horse approached me to illustrate this adaptation, I jumped at the chance to tell this funny, fantastical story full of rich and charming characters. Designing the larger than life figures of Papa Nancy and Spider has been a delight, but my favorite by far, was capturing the endearing quirks and idiosyncrasies of Fat Charlie.”
Anansi Boys is a spinoff of one of Neil Gaiman’s most successful stories: American Gods. It was a tale that follows the story of the sons of Anansi, the trickster African Spider-God of stories. The series lead follows the boring life of a young “Fat” Charlie Nancy, a plain-old Londoner with an uneventful life who discovers that his very recently deceased father was in fact, a legendary African trickster god. After discovering his mysterious twin brother, aptly named Spider, Charlie’s life is taken for a spin as he enters a world of magic and mystery, essentially changing everything about his world and disrupting his lifestyle. Plus, a whole lot of singing and music too.
Surprisingly, there are a whole lot of black cultural references in this book and it is genuinely surprising to see how much effort the author put into depicting representation well. This was revealed to be a major motivating factor for Bernardin as to why he’d agreed to script adapt it.
“It’s the getting to play with African folklore in a contemporary setting. It’s getting to play with cultural specificity with a Black story that does not require the standard Black story tropes,” says Bernadin. “There is no pain, no tragedy. There is joy and fear but not one whiff of slavery. It’s about a man whose life is far bigger than he could have imagined and how he deals with that. And it’s funny, it’s romantic. It’s a gift to play in this world.”
Bernadin and Gaiman first met when the former was an editor at Entertainment Weekly covering comics. Gaiman himself had personally approached Bernandin to tackle the adaptation, as the author had already made a name for himself in comics having written the Eisner-nominated YA fantastic graphic novel Adora and the Distance. Atop of this, Bernandin also writes the Star Wars: Mace Windu series of comics for Marvel.
