Dark Horse Comics has announced Dungeons & Dragons: Total Party Killers, a four-issue series by writer Christopher Hastings (The Unbelievable Gwenpool), artist Denis Medri (Red Hood/Arsenal), colorist Dan Jackson (Stranger Things), and letterer Lucas Gattoni (Absolute Green Lantern). Due out this summer, the series will flip the script on the traditional D&D adventure, with a party made up of the game’s monsters, including a werewolf, beholder, and mind flayer.
The wizard Custos has died, and his lair lies ripe for the taking! As adventurers raid the lair for treasure, the monsters enthralled by Custos in life must protect his domain even after his death. That is, unless the creatures can trick someone into releasing them! Thus, a lycanthrope, gelatinous cube, mind flayer, death knight, and baby beholder form their own adventuring party to win their freedom in a hostile world!
Issue #1 will be released on July 22, with cover art by Elizabeth Beals, Matías Bergara, Michael Walsh, and Lukas Ketner, as well as a blank character sheet cover. The book will mark Dark Horse’s second D&D series since acquiring the license from Wizards of the Coast, following The Fallbacks, which is set to conclude with issue #4 on May 20.
It also marks Hastings’s first monthly comic since 2022’s Dynamite series Hell Sonja. The writer, whose projects in the interim have included InvestiGators spin-off Agents of S.U.I.T., has also served as gamemaster on the narrative role-playing podcast Rude Tales of Magic, specifically on its newly concluded campaign Nethermurk.
In the meantime, along with the remaining issues of The Fallbacks, Dark Horse will release a Comics Giveaway Day issue, featuring a D&D story by Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, and Alessandro Miracolo, on Saturday, May 2. A collection of IDW’s series based on the 1980s cartoon will follow on August 4, as will the trade paperback of The Fallbacks on September 8. A Library Edition of the publisher’s Stranger Things and D&D crossovers will also be released on May 26.
Check out the variant covers for the first issue below:
