Strange Adventures Goes Black Label in New Preview

Strange Adventures, the comic so hotly anticipated that DC is already making a show about it before it comes out, is in for some changes. The book, written by Tom King, with art from Mitch Gerads and Doc Shaner and letters from Clayton Cowles, is being upgraded from a regular DC comic to the company’s prestige mature readers format, Black Label.

“As Strange Adventures was coming together, we had to take a step back and look at what made the most sense for the project,” said the project’s editor, Jamie S. Rich. “Since its tone and themes are more in the vein of Mister Miracle than, say, Tom King’s work on Batman, we decided that it made more sense to give Strange Adventures its own space, where Tom, Mitch, Doc, and Clayton could follow the story to all the different places it might take them.”

Black Label is a signifier of more mature content, but it’s also developing into an indicator of quality — some of the other books in the line include, among many others, Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Ricardo Federici’s popular The Last God, the incredibly good Jeff Lemire/Denys Cowan/Bill Sienkiewicz The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage, Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s eerie Joker: Killer Smile, and the dueling shrieking thrash metal alternate future books, Batman: The Last Knight on Earth by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo and Wonder Woman: Dead Earth by Daniel Warren Johnson.

Compared to these, Strange Adventures is likely to be more subdued fare. King has shown he can do high superhero adventure as well as anyone, but he really excels at quieter introspection, even if it is periodically intertwined with massive retcons like making Krypton’s destruction the fault of unchecked capitalism. Strange Adventureshas been billed as a book that examines the gap between the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others tell about us. Also Mister Terrific is going to be a war crimes investigator.

Really, you shouldn’t need more to be sold on a book from the team behind Mister Miracle (one of the best comics of the last decade), but if you do, here are some lettered preview pages that look bonkers. Strange Adventures drops on March 4, 2020.