David López webcomic BlackHand & IronHead gets print edition

BlackHand & IronHead, the popular Panel Syndicate web comic from David López, will get its first U.S. print edition this September from Image Comics.

The official name for this will be the BlackHand & IronHead Vol. 1 hardcover edition, and it will hit comic shops on Wednesday, Sept. 2, and traditional bookstores on Tuesday, Sept. 8. It will also remain available online through Panel Syndicate.

For the uninitiated, the pitch for BlackHand & IronHead is “A comedy about family, with super heroes, not about super heroes.” López, who has done extensive work in Big 2 comics, concluded the five-issue series in 2018.

This is not the first time that material that first appeared on Panel Syndicate — a platform for web comics by a number of creators, the two most prominent of which are writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin — have been published by Image Comics. In recent years, the publisher also put Barrier by Vaughan and Martin into print for the first time.

Full PR about this from Image, along with preview pages, can be found below…enjoy!

The fan-favorite BlackHand & IronHead web comic miniseries by David López, originally published online by Panel Syndicate, will be collected and in print for the first time in the U.S. from Image Comics. This BlackHand & IronHead, Vol. 1 hardcover edition will be available in September.

“After many years working only as an artist in the big two, I’ve finally found the courage and I’ve written and drawn my own story, and I’m printing it in Image! Where the world’s best authors publish their works, this is a change of scale, suddenly my public is the whole world, can you believe it?!” said López. “BlackHand & IronHead is sincere, raw, unfiltered and personal, no obligations or compromises, exactly the story I imagined, that’s something I love as a reader and I hope people will love it from my book.”

In BlackHand & IronHead, Vol. 1, Alexia’s father is the head of a superpowered corporate empire and one of the greatest superheroes of all time, and she desperately wants to take up his mantle. However, upon his sudden death, a woefully unprepared Alexia is confronted with a wealth of well-kept family secrets—including a villainous sister she never knew existed. Can the sisters work together to investigate their father’s mysterious death? Or will they destroy each other in the process?

BlackHand & IronHead, Vol. 1 (ISBN: 978-1-5343-1689-8) will be available on Wednesday, September 2 and in bookstores on Tuesday, September 8. It can be pre-ordered at your local comic book shops, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, IndieBound, and Indigo.

BlackHand & IronHead, Vol. 1 will remain available in digital on Panel Syndicate.