BOOM! Studios Announces New Grim Fantasy Series BRIAR
Experience the story of Sleeping Beauty like never before in the newest four issue limited comic book series from BOOM! Studios, Briar. Created by Eisner Award nominated writer, producer and director Christopher Cantwell, artist Germán García, and colorist Matheus Lopes, this tale promises to be anything but a sappy recreation of the famous fairy tale. Set in a brutal fantasy world, Sleeping Beauty never gets her happily ever after and instead will have to save herself. Here’s what Cantwell has to say about it:
I’ve never gotten a chance to tell a high fantasy story of any kind, but I’ve always wanted to, ever since I discovered old Robert E. Howard stories. One thing that kept me hesitant was finding a proper way in—something new and different that also celebrates all the sword & sorcery fun seen in the best of the genre… …In tandem, as I grow older, the world around us seems less and less stable with so many things falling into crisis. These two things came together in my head in the form of BRIAR… here’s someone that remembers the world one way, during a time of sheltered innocence, but has now overslept… and found herself in a place of complete entropic disarray. The question is, how will she even survive? And what happens when the plans for the entire rest of your life turn out to be completely meaningless and absurd? Where do you turn to in order to conjure up your own new meaning and purpose?
I actually really like the concept of focusing on how drastically the world has changed for Sleeping Beauty. Stories about her don’t really focus on how dramatic of a change that must have been by either shortening the time she was asleep, or simply never telling us how she felt about it. But it’s a feeling we can all relate to I think as the world changes so fast from when we were kids to when we become adults. Print copies of Briar #1 will be available in September 2022 exclusively at local comic book shops and the BOOM! Studios webstore. Digital copies will be available from comiXology, iBooks, Google Play, and Kindle. You can check out the cover art for issue 1 below by Garcia as well as variants by Yanick Paquette, Mirka Andolfo, and Jenny Frison as well as some character designs by Garcia.
