Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Carlton Cruse, chuck hogan, Comics, dark horse, david lapham, entertainment, fx, guillermo del toro, Mike Huddleston, the strain, The Strain #1, The Strain #2, tv

Get Del Toro's The Strain #1 And #2 From Dark Horse Free Here Ahead Of The TV Debut

The Strain is coming to TV with FX in just a couple of weeks now, on July 13th, which is based, if you somehow don't know this, on the New York Times Best-selling novel by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, but it's also based on the Dark Horse Comics adaptations by David Lapham and Mike Huddleston (as executive produced by Carlton Cuse). There's been much debate about just how much influence the comic and grpahic novel series from Dark Horse would have on the visual development of the TV series, and after the release of the trailer, quite a few features suggesting the impact of Lapham and Huddleston's work, and this makes sense considering how closely both worked with Del Toro originally on the design of the vampires, the appearance of the coffin, and even the look of the cast of characters.

To celebrate the release of the show, Dark Horse are collecting the first two trade paperbacks of the series into one hardback volume, The Strain: Book One, arriving on July 9th, and accompanying this with an upcoming social media presence for "Strain Sundays". Dark Horse are also publishing The Strain #1 as part of their #1 for $1.00 line to give readers a jumping on point to the series and give them a window on whether they're ready to dive into the big Book One collection.

But there's also a distinctive retailer-aimed program underway regarding The Strain with special incentives that's so multi-faceted that it suggests Dark Horse has been preparing for a big jump in readership with the advent of the show for awhile. The trade paperbacks have already been promoted as part of Dark Horse's "Daily Deals" with an extra discount, the upcoming new series of the comic for August, The Night Eternal, has been offered as returnable with orders of 20 or more, and Dark Horse added the trades to their Halloween/horror backlist in Previews as well.

As healthy as interest has been in collections of The Strain from retailers given all these angles of approach, the most surprising development has been a massive response from the book market in ordering the hardcover collection ahead of the show. So, we've got the close interrelationship of the comic and the show rather than simply the original novel, the response of retailers based on Dark Horse's ramping up of access to the book for readers, and on top of that, a book market that's likely to have a copy of the hardcover in every shop window. Are you ready for The Strain? Soon, it's going to be fairly inescapable.

But there's something extra-meaningful to us here at Bleeding Cool in that Dark Horse have offered to give readers a free download of issues #1 and #2 of the comic. The Strain has come to Bleeding Cool. Time to see what all the chatter is about and scrutinize the relationship between the comic and the TV show once it airs.

Without further ado, here are your two free issues. A big thank you to Dark Horse for this gesture of enthusiasm for the comic and for reaching out to our readers in this way.

And if you want to follow Del Toro's hint-dropping about his master-plans for the TV show and maybe pick up a few leads on the relationship between the comic and the show, you can also check out his recent interview on his "five season plan" here.

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