Dark Horse Comics have announced Let This One Be a Devil, a new horror series written by James Tynion IV and Steve Foxe, featuring art by Piotr Kowalski, colors by Brad Simpson, and lettering by Tom Napolitano. The four-issue series, which starts on February 19, will mark the second in Tiny Onion’s True Weird line, after Blue Book, and tell the story of the Jersey Devil, a monster said to lurk in southern New Jersey.
In the early 1900s, Henry Naughton returns home to the family farm in the swampy Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. One night, he encounters a strange predator stalking the woods. This sends the young scholar on a research project that uncovers the legend of Mother Leeds and the terrible birth of the Jersey Devil in 1735.
Tynion states, “Starting with Blue Book, the beating heart of the Tiny Onion publishing program with Dark Horse has been the exploration of what I call ‘True Weird’ stories — comics based on the real stories of encounters with the strange and impossible. Let This One Be a Devil is the first in a whole new set of titles in our True Weird library at Dark Horse, in which we’ll tell the stories inspired by the accounts that brought figures like the Jersey Devil, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster into the public consciousness. This is just the beginning.”
Foxe adds, “The legend of the Jersey Devil spans centuries and bridges the supernatural and the cryptozoological in a way unique among figures of American monster folklore. With Let This One Be a Devil, we’re setting out to tell the definitive Jersey Devil story, combining an original narrative with all the many contradictory tales of the creature to reveal what’s really been stalking the Pine Barrens all these years. And as with many cryptids, the story behind the Jersey Devil’s history has proven to be just as fascinating as its outsized myth.”
Like Blue Book, issue #1 will be released with a back-up by letterer-turned-writer Rachel Deering, artist Jesse Lonergan, and letterer Aditya Bidikar. It will have a main cover by Gavin Fullerton (The Closet), plus variants by Kowalski, and Max Fiumara (The Sacrificers), which you can check out below. In the meantime, the trade paperback of Blue Book Vol. 2: 1947 will be released on October 29, while True Weird Vol. 1, a collection of the back-ups in Blue Book, will drop on February 4.
