Posted in: Comics, Image | Tagged: image comics, kieron gillen, ludocrats

A Brief History Of Kieron Gillen, Ahead Of Ludocrats #1 FOC

I was in the pub last night with Kieron Gillen and friends. He said something very funny about his upcoming series from Image Comics, Ludocrats, but I can't remember what it was. Anyway, it's inspired me to run this Brief History Of Kieron Gillen, what with Ludocrats #1 being FOC'ed this weekend.

A Brief History Of Kieron Gillen

For those amongst you who haven't been paying attention, Kieron Gillen is one of comics' top writers and worst joke makers. He used to sit around the pub once a week with the likes of me, Antony Johnston, Alex De Campi, Andrew Wheeler and a bunch more from the Warren Ellis Forum, being a semi-famous games journalist and making some rather poor comics (we all did). But he chose to work with one of the worst artists amongst us, Jamie McKelvie, who as you might have noticed got a lot better, fast. Just saying, there's a reason Kieron and Jamie did a WicDiv arc called 'Commercial Suicide' so as to thwart people googling for the original comic with that name by them…

So, launching his career at Image Comics with the Jamie McKelvie-illustrated Phonogram, which won high praise but low sales, Gillen went on to become one of Marvel's rising stars, picked by Warren Ellis for newuniversal, then on titles like Ares, S.W.O.R.D., Thor, Journey Into Mystery, Invincible Iron Man, and Uncanny X-Men, if anything his puns getting worse, before teaming up with McKelvie for the insanely beloved Young Avengers, and then heading back to Image with Jamie to finish Phonogram and launch The Wicked + The Divine, which won high praise and high sales.

After that, Star Wars and Darth Vader beckoned, co-creating Doctor Aphra along the way, but for the past couple years, Gillen has gone from strength to strength in terms of his creator-owned work, his Image collaboration with Stephanie Hans, Die, launching to universal acclaim, becoming the best-selling comic in many stores with a strong gaming audience, and garnering multiple sellouts at the end of 2018, out-pacing his work at every other publisher.

And now he's back at Image, with an idiosyncratic new series, The Ludocrats, debuting, suitably enough, on April Fool's Day. It has been a long time coming, originally announced at Image Expo with David LaFuente as artist back in 2015. The Ludocrats is now drawn by Jeff Stokely and co-written by Jim Rossignol, and based on the preview PDF that Image has been circulating… it looks completely mad. Stokely, whose past credits include The Spire and Six-Gun Gorilla, both with Si Spurrier at Boom – which makes this a scalp that Gillen has taken from Boom Studios for Image –  and is doing the work of his career here, helped in no small measure by the colours of Tamra Bonvillain, and storywise, Gillen seems to be taking readers into yet another new realm.

So doing the math here: The Ludocrats is all set to be the next big Kieron Gillen comic, but "big" is a relative term. Is it going to be Die big? Wic Div big? Darth Vader big? We've made much about Kieron Gillen's latest breakout success of Die, and we've heard through the rumour mill that the Die trades have been outpacing Saga in sales momentum, so it could be the sky is the limit with this one.

But Ludocrats is markedly different in feel, Image promising a comic book that'll be fun rather than bleak and will recapture the whimsical spirit of I Hate Fairyland mixed with Good Omens. And between election season in the U.S., the endless coronavirus outbreak updates, and ongoing Brexit unease, and ComiXology putting their prices up 70% across Europe, what comics desperately needs right now is fun. So we've got a video trailer, a Cover B by WicDiv's Jamie McKelvie, who really is rather splendid these days, and we're all very jealous, and a promise that all of Image Comics themselves are "pulsating ominously" in anticipation of this one.

Oh and hey, an April Fool's Day cover – Image notes that the comic will ship with five covers and that one of the covers will feature a quote from whichever store orders the most,

With Mercy reportedly selling out day of a 60,000 copy print run the day of release, DECORUM, ADVENTUREMAN, FIRE POWER, PULP, the return of DIE! DIE! DIE!, THE GODDAMNED, and NAILBITER, on the way, it appears both Kieron Gillen and Image Comics have a very strong 2020 ahead of them at. Sorry Boom…

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