Creators Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin are two of the very few creators who have worked on The Walking Dead outside of Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard. Their short story, “The Alien,” was released a few years back, and tells a side-story set in the universe of The Walking Dead, far from the action of the main series. Originally published digitally via Vaughan and Martin’s Panel Syndicate, the story debuted in print just last year as a special Local Comic Shop Day release. Now Image Comics has announced a hardcover release for The Walking Dead: The Alien, chock-full of new back matter material.
The dimensions for the hardcover aren’t specified, but it seems likely that they’ll be the same as those for the hardcover collection of The Private Eye, one of Vaughan and Martin’s other Panel Syndicate series, which clocked in at just over 12 inches by 7.5 inches. The new back matter material will include process art and character sketches by Martin, a few of which you can see below.
In a statement announcing the hardcover, Kirkman expressed his enthusiasm at having Vaughan and Martin’s Walking Dead story available in a hardcover format:
“I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Vaughan and Martin’s work,” said Kirkman. “I’ve been very hesitant to allow anyone to play in the Walking Dead sandbox in comic form but when the opportunity arose for these gents to show up what Charlie Adlard and I had been doing, I jumped at the chance. It’s remarkable what Vaughan and Martin were able to accomplish in one self-contained story. A tale with so much heart and emotion told far more succinctly than I’ve ever been capable of. I’m so thrilled to finally be sharing this story with a wider audience in this spectacular hardcover edition.”
The oversized hardcover edition of The Walking Dead: The Alien will arrive in comic shops on Wednesday, July 29th, with a bookstore release date the following Tuesday, August 4th. And if you can’t wait that long to read the story, it’s still available on Panel Syndicate right now for a cost of whatever you think is fair.
I really, really hope Image isn’t planning to release this hardcover in the traditional portrait format of most comics, the way the LCSD version was printed. The landscape pages of this story were never designed to be split across two pages. The fact that the LCSD version was marketed as a desirable limited-edition special is baffling to me. It was a fairly awful presentation of the material.
Mostly I can’t believe Martin and Vaughn would put this out in anything other than the Private Eye format, but then the cover and back-matter pages previewed here look to be portrait format, so I dunno.
I guess the only reason not to use the Private Eye format is that there just aren’t enough story pages to make the book thick enough to work, but that doesn’t really make sense. You can make a hardcover out of a single signature of pages.
I suppose time will tell.
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