Wow, jetzt gehen CrossGen schon die Zeichner laufen, bevor das erste Heft überhaupt erschienen ist...

CROSSGEN RESCHEDULES RAVEN HOUSE, MANCO REPLACED AS ARTIST

According to CrossGen, Raven House has been pulled from the schedule for June, and will now ship in August with a new artist attached. Raven House was to have been the next series in a line of diverse genres that also included the pirate series, El Cazador, the tongue-in-cheek spy thriller, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the recently cancelled-before-launching American Power.

Announced at MegaCon, Newsarama previously spoke with writer Chuck Dixon about Raven House.

In a similar vein as Wuthering Heights and The Others just to name two, Raven House tells the story of a beautiful young woman summoned to a shadowy mansion to serve as a tutor for the owner?s son. Upon her arrival, she finds a village living in fear of her employer, Lord Dalamar, hallway after hallway of locked doors, and more secrets than she can shake a proper English stick at.

For Dixon, a move to the gothic horror of Raven House isn?t something as far afield as some may think. Yeah ? everyone knew Dixon is a fan of pirates (hence El Cazador, and Westerns, but horror is a genre near and dear to the writer as well.

?I did quite a bit of horror stuff back in my early career,? Dixon told Newsarama. ?Piles of EC-type horror stories for Eclipse's Tales of Terror. And I did an interesting horror graphic novel for Epic with Jorge Zaffino called Seven Block that will be reprinted by IDW in the near future.

?For me, Raven House goes back to those great period horror flicks made by Roger Corman in the '60s. The ones with Vincent Price that were shot in shadowy seaside mansions where everyone was in on the Big Secret except for the female lead. Creepy stuff that I ate up at Saturday matinees.

?I've always wanted to tackle a gothic horror story. DC actually had some success in this genre in the early '70s. Alex Toth and Tony DeZuniga illustrated some terrific 64-page specials with titles like The Sinister House of Forbidden Love. I thought there'd be an audience for this kind of comic. I also resist typecasting and like to flex my muscles in different genres.?

Originally, Leonardo Manco was attached to the project as the artist, but has since departed the miniseries. According to CrossGen, current Kiss Kiss Bang Bang artist Mike Perkins will now be the artist for Raven House. Questions about the future of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, (which was conceived of by Perkins) about the future of that series to CrossGen by Newsarama went unanswered.