JASON AARON & MAHMUD ASRAR’S BRUTAL, HIGH-STAKES
BUG WARS SERIES TO LAUNCH IN FEBRUARY 2025
The superstar team of writer Jason Aaron (Southern Bastards, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Absolute Superman) and artist Mahmud Asrar (Conan the Barbarian, X-Men, Batman & Robin) join forces for the upcoming series, Bug Wars. The extra-length first issue of this six issue, dark fantasy, epic miniseries is set to debut in February 2025 from Image Comics.
Aaron and Asrar will appear on the “Image Comics Presents: Breaking Ground” panel on Sunday, October 20 @ 11 a.m. in room 406.2 at New York Comic Con this week to share more details about the announcement. They can also be found in Artist Alley at tables H42 (Aaron) and D24 (Asrar), A limited number of Bug Wars ashcans will be available for sale.
Slade Slaymaker is a kid from Alabama suddenly lost in a vicious world beyond his imagining. It’s a world of marauding ant armies, spell-casting spider witches, and beetle-riding barbarians. A kingdom of tiny but deadly warriors hidden in his own backyard. The same world that saw his father eaten alive by insects and now plunges young Slade into the middle of a brutal Bug War to decide the fate of his family.
“When I was a kid, our backyard was a wondrous place, where I spent hours imagining epic adventures, action figures scattered all through the grass. In a lot of ways, I still feel like that kid, running around the yard, making up stories. Only the stories have gotten a bit darker over the years,” said Aaron. “For Slade Slaymaker, the backyard of his home in Alabama turns out to be a place of terror and brutality, where sects of tiny sword-wielding Mytes and their armies of flesh-eating beetles and acid-spraying ants have declared war on his family. Think Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets Game of Thrones.”
Asrar added: “Bug Wars is the culmination of what I wanted to do in comics: A fantasy epic told with no holds barred. A tale where our imaginations run wild. A place where we reach the heights of escapism, all while keeping everything grounded with pure human emotion straight from the heart.”
A savage, bloody look at the world below our feet, enter: Bug Wars—where tiny warriors wage a violent war for dominance over an insect-driven kingdom.
Bug Wars #1 will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, February 12, 2025. It will also be available across many digital platforms, including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play.
About Jason Aaron:
JASON AARON is an award-winning comic book writer, who is best known for his work with Marvel Comics, including a landmark seven-year run on THOR and the 2015 STAR WARS series that became the best-selling American comic book in more than 20 years.
Aaron is currently spearheading the 40th anniversary relaunch of TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES for IDW and the hotly anticipated ABSOLUTE SUPERMAN for DC Comics. His critically acclaimed creator-owned work includes the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning SOUTHERN BASTARDS from Image Comics and the New York Times best-selling crime series SCALPED from DC, plus the recently released ONCE UPON A TIME AT THE END OF THE WORLD from BOOM! Studios. Aaron was born and raised in Alabama and currently resides in Kansas City.
Visit: JasonAaron.info.
About Mahmud Asrar:
Mahmud Asrar grew up with a passion to draw comics which led to a degree in art, and he has since worked for major publishers like Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse and beyond!
Some of his work includes the award-winning Conan The Barbarian, King Conan, and X-Men for Marvel, as well as the Batman & Robin event for DC Comics. Asrar resides in Vienna, Austria with his wife and son.
Visit: MahmudAsrar.com.
About Image Comics:
Image Comics is a comic book and graphic novel publisher founded in 1992 by a collective of bestselling artists. Image has since gone on to become one of the largest comics publishers in the United States, and is the #2 graphic novel publisher in America. It is the publisher of such award winning titles as, Spawn, The Walking Dead, Invincible, Saga, Monstress, Deadly Class, Chew, The Old Guard, I Kill Giants, Criminal, The Department of Truth, W0rldtr33, Geiger, Descender, Gideon Falls, It’s Lonely At The Centre of The Earth, Do A Power Bomb, and more.
The company currently has six individuals on the Board of Directors: Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino, and Eric Stephenson. It consists of five major houses: Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow Productions, Shadowline Comics, Skybound Entertainment, and Image Central. Image publishes comics and graphic novels in nearly every genre, sub-genre, and style imaginable. It offers science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, crime fiction, historical fiction, humor, and more by the finest artists and writers working in the medium today. For more information, visit: www.imagecomics.com.
