Dark Horse Books to Publish Elephantmen 2261 Volume 1 and Ask for Mercy Volume 1
in Print for the First Time in 2023
October 10, 2022—New York, NY—This October, renowned font designer and letterer Richard Starkings returns to his iconic pulp sci-fi comic book series Elephantmen and his dark fantasy series Ask For Mercy. Both series will be available from Amazon’s Comixology Originals exclusive digital content line. And in 2023 Dark Horse Books will publish Elephantmen 2261 Volume 1 and Ask for Mercy Volume 1 for the first time in print.
Elephantmen 2261: Under Each Skin begins a new adventure featuring Starkings’ beloved human/hippo hybrid character Hip Flask. While at The White Dragon for noodles on a rainy evening in LA, Hip meets Alonia and later finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue surrounding her appearance. Elephantmen 2261 Season Four #1 (of 5) with art by Axel Medellin and covers by Ian Churchill begins October 11, 2022.
Ask for Mercy: The Circle of Time follows fan favorite characters Becky and Ratmir. While lost in the Forest of Silence we learn more about their origins. Can they get out alive and if they do where will they head next? The action-packed and artistically stunning horror fantasy series Ask For Mercy written by Starkings with art by breakout talent Abigail Jill Harding continues in Ask For Mercy Season Four #1 (of 6) on October 25, 2022.
Elephantmen: 2261 Volume 1 [264 pages / color / on sale February 21, 2023 in bookstores and everywhere books are sold / MSRP $24.99/$33.99 pbk / ISBN: 978-1-50673-540-5] is part of the Dark Horse Books and Comixology Originals print program. It is available for pre-order now through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and your local comic shop.
Ask For Mercy Volume 1 [304 pages / color / on sale March 21, 2023 in bookstores and everywhere books are sold / MSRP $29.99/$39.99 pbk / ISBN: 9781-50672-451-5] is part of the Dark Horse Books and Comixology Originals print program. It is available for pre-order now through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and your local comic shop.
About the Creators:
Richard Starkings is the creator/writer of Elephantmen; co-creator, with Abigail Jill Harding, of Ask For Mercy! and co-creator, with Tyler Shainline and Shaky Kane, of The Beef. In the course of a distinguished career in comic books, Richard edited a line of original titles for Marvel UK in the 80s, founded the Comicraft design and lettering studio in the 90s and established the foremost source for comic book lettering fonts at comicbookfonts.com. He has worked as a lettering artist on just about every mainstream comic book you might care to mention, including Batman: The Killing Joke, and has written comic strips for The Real Ghostbusters, Zoids, Transformers and Doctor Who. With Comicraft’s Secret Weapon, John Roshell, Richard created the indispensable guide, Comic Book Lettering The Comicraft Way as well as the Artist Retrospectives Tim Sale: Black And White and J Scott Campbell: Time Capsule. Richard loves Yorkshire Tea, Cadbury’s Flake and Lori Perkins, but not necessarily in that order.
Axel Medellin has been creating art for the Elephantmen series since 2010 and is probably meeting a deadline right now. Nevertheless, he has somehow managed to fit in drawing and coloring other comics for Heavy Metal, Zenescope, Boom! Studios and Image Comics’ Fifty Girls Fifty with Frank Cho.
Abigail Jill Harding is a young English illustrator and comic book artist from Yorkshire, whose first professional comics work appeared in Elephantmen #72, written by Richard Starkings whom she met at a signing at Travelling Man in York. Abigail graduated from York College with a BA honours in 3D Art and Design in 2015 but continued to concentrate on her illustration work and did small comic projects. Abigail had been showcasing her mixed-media skills at the yearly Leeds Comics Arts Festival, Thought Bubble and it was the short strip she contributed to the festival’s 2015 print anthology that caught Richard’s eye. Since then she has done cover work for Titan Comics.
