Last month, Dark Horse Comics announced Crimson Flower, a new fantasy revenge series from writer Matt Kindt and artist Matt Lesniewski. The second issue of the series is due out in February, and today Dark Horse has revealed, exclusively to The Beat, the two covers for Crimson Flower #2 by Lesniewski and variant cover artists Patric Reynolds & Lee Loughridge.
Here’s how Dark Horse describes Crimson Flower:
After losing her family in a violent home invasion, a woman uses folk tales to cope. In a blood-soaked journey toward revenge, she tracks down the man responsible for her family’s deaths, only to discover a startling government plot–to weaponize folk tales and use them to raise children into super assassins.
Crimson Flower is one of two Dark Horse titles for Lesniewski announced in October. The other, Static, is a sci-fi horror graphic novel written and illustrated by Lesniewski, in which a man attempts to break free of a cycle in which he’s been trapped for years. Reynolds’s most recent interior work for Dark Horse was last year’s The Mask: I Pledge Allegiance to The Mask, written by Christopher Cantwell.
Along with the covers, Dark Horse has also provided The Beat with process artwork for Reynolds & Loughridge’s variant cover, from Reynolds’s concept sketches, to pencils, to inks, and finally the finished painted piece with Loughridge’s colors. It’s an interesting look behind-the-scenes at the development and completion of a really striking piece of artwork.
You can check out both covers, as well as the process art for the Reynolds/Loughridge cover, below. Look for Crimson Flower #2 to arrive in stores in February.