EMMA RÍOS MAKES RARE U.S. APPEARANCE FOR IMAGE EXPO, ANNOUNCES ISLAND & 8HOUSE COLLABORATIONS WITH B

EMMA RÍOS MAKES RARE U.S. APPEARANCE FOR IMAGE EXPO, ANNOUNCES ISLAND & 8HOUSE COLLABORATIONS WITH BRANDON GRAHAM

Making a rare U.S. appearance for Image Expo this year, comics creator Emma Ríos officially announced ISLAND and 8HOUSE, both collaborations with Brandon Graham, are due in 2015.

ISLAND, a collaboration spearheaded by Ríos and Graham and featuring a murderer's row of the most interesting artists in comics, will be an oversized 72-page monthly magazine, scheduled for June 2015. “The idea is to make longer-form stories in each issue than you get in many anthologies,” explained Graham. “The chapters will be 20 to 30 pages each. So it will be like a bundle of several comics in one book.”

ISLAND #1 features a story named ID by Emma Ríos, the return of Brandon Graham's Multiple Warheads, and Dagger Proof Mummy by Ludroe, along with a series of illustrations by Marian Churchland. The magazine will also have articles that blend prose and comics, fictional fashion, and mechanical designs for things that will never exist.

Emma Ríos’s ISLAND: ID explores the struggle of three different people who consider a 'body transplant' as a solution to their lives. A sci-fi tale as a vehicle to talk about identity, how to see or be seen, and about how deep serious matters can also become casual and frivolous. Do you like your body? Who does?

Graham will contribute ISLAND: MULTIPLE WARHEADS: GHOST TOWN, wherein Sexica and her werewolf boyfriend, Nikoli, push deeper into the mysteries of the wailing wall and the ancient wizard who hides within its cliffs.

8HOUSE is a shared universe to be built by different teams working in independent miniseries. 8HOUSE begins with two stories, MIRROR by Emma Ríos and Hwei Lim and ARCLIGHT by Brandon Graham and Marian Churchland, as well as a slew of others.

Emma Ríos’s 8HOUSE: MIRROR is set in an isolated colony growing around a landed lab starship. In this safe haven, magicians and scientists of the House of Healers experiment with the satellite's local fauna to create man/animal "hybrids," obtaining insight to utilize in a desperate cosmic war and win political favor. But a growing community of hybrids want nothing to do with war or politics, and especially not with their patronizing human creators; only to live on their own, as they are.

Graham’s 8HOUSE: ARCLIGHT will be a four-issue story following a noble woman who believes she is permanently trapped in an alien body. Until she hears of the alien being living in her body has returned, taking over the noble woman's old life.

"Few creators are as full-on committed to pushing the boundaries of comics as Brandon Graham, and the 8House books and Island alike are so different from standard comics fare that it's like unearthing artifacts from some amazing parallel dimension where comics developed into something much different from what we've come to expect,” said Eric Stephenson, Publisher at Image Comics. “The involvement of modern day visionaries like Emma Rios, Ludroe, and Marian Churchland, to name but a few of Brandon's co-conspirators, just adds to my excitement for what are easily some of the most progressive comics we've ever published."

Both ISLAND and 8HOUSE are set to launch from Image Comics in 2015.