Welcome back to The Beat Digest, a twice-weekly round-up of the biggest comics-related news stories we’ve missed every Tuesday and Friday. Is there a story out there you think we should cover? Be sure to let us know in the comments.
§ Prime Video will release Butterfly, the TV show based on the BOOM! Studios series by Arash Amel, Marguerite Bennett, Antonio Fuso, and Stefano Simeone, in its entirety on Wednesday, August 13. Executive produced by and starring Daniel Dae Kim, Butterfly follows a retired American spy living in South Korea, who finds himself targeted by an assassin (Reina Hardesty) over a regretful decision he made in the past. The show, which consists of six episodes, also stars Piper Perabo and Louis Landau, and was developed by executive producers Ken Woodruff and Steph Cha.
§ Netflix announced The Sandman season two will conclude with a bonus episode, “Death: The High Cost of Living.” Releasing on Thursday, July 31, the season’s 12th episode is based on the 1993 miniseries of the same name by Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo, and Mark Buckingham, and will see Death (played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste) spend a day as a human. In the meantime, the first six episodes of the final season will be released on July 3, and the remaining five will arrive on July 24; you can check out all the newly revealed titles for them at the link.
§ Variety reports Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek, Amelia Aierwood: Basic Witch) has joined the cast of Marvel’s Disney+ series Vision Quest. She will play E.D.I.T.H., the defense AI housed in Tony Stark’s glasses that was at the center of 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home (where it was originally voiced by editor Dawn Michelle King.) Hampshire previously worked with showrunner Terry Matalas on Syfy’s 12 Monkeys. The show, which features a number of Stark’s AIs, including Vision (Paul Bettany), Ultron (James Spader), and Jocasta (T’Nia Miller), will be released sometime next year.
§ In the run-up to today’s Summer Games Fest, Marvel and Sony unveiled Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a fighting game by Japanese developer Arc System Works, that’ll be released on PC and PlayStation 5 sometime next year. The game will be 4v4, meaning both opposing parties can have up to four players working together. Meanwhile, DIE SOFT launched a demo for Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland, a retro adventure starring Winsor McCay‘s beloved character. The full game will be released on Steam and itch.io in the first quarter of 2026, and the Nintendo Switch at some point afterwards.
§ Via Prism Comics, Oni Press have acquired the rights to Iolanda Zanfardino and Elisa Romboli‘s queer romance A Thing Called Truth. The series, which follows a scientist and her love interest on a road trip across Europe, was originally released by Image in 2022. The new edition will include the previously unpublished second volume (which was crowdfunded under the title A Thing Called Truth: Drive Home), and hit stores on January 7, 2026. Additionally, Oni announced (via Major Spoilers) that the second installment of Jeremy Lambert and Alexa Sharpe‘s fantasy trilogy The Night Mother will arrive on April 28, 2026.
§ Dark Horse will release Yojimbot Volume 2: Nights of Rust, the next installment of Sylvain Repos and Noiry‘s post-apocalyptic robot samurai tale, on November 19, 2025. The publisher also revealed box sets of the three most recent Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novels, and the Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins books, which’ll be released respectively on September 17, and November 5. (By the way, did anyone else realize those franchises each turned 20 and 10 this year? Wow.)
§ Via ICv2, Papercutz announced Vol. 2 of the middle-grade Flash Gordon Adventures! will debut on November 4. Creators Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani will be joined this time round by a whole host of contributors, including Stan Sakai, John Patrick Green, Mike Cavallaro, Rich Koslowski, Ryan Estrada, and Jim Keefe. Via ComicBook and Comic Watch, they also announced rereleases of the graphic novelizations of Encanto and Turning Red for November; both books were originally published by Penguin Random House’s Disney imprint.
§ Twisted Comics revealed their first Black Mirror graphic novel will be an adaptation of the Star Trek-inspired episode “USS Callister,” scripted by Neil Gibson with art by Silvano Beltramo, and that it will be launched on Kickstarter. Meanwhile, in other crowdfunding news, Tombstone Publishing unveiled Heartbreaker: The Lost Art of Sean Phillips, a collection of the Criminal artist’s earliest work for DC Thomson in the 1980s. At the time of writing, the Kickstarter has raised £7000 of its £9000 goal.
§ Finally, in variant cover news, Marvel revealed all the covers for the new Swimsuit Special: Friends, Foes & Rivals, due out July 9; while via The Wrap, IDW Publishing unveiled Art Adams‘s ominous cover C for Tim Seeley and Nikola Čižmešija‘s Godzilla #1, due out July 23.
