PORTLAND, Ore. 02/12/2024 — The multiple Eisner Award winning creative duo of bestselling writer Ed Brubaker and superstar artist Sean Phillips—and team behind such chart-topping titles as Criminal, Pulp, The Fade Out, Reckless, Night Fever, and Where the Body Was—will hit shelves once again with their upcoming original graphic novel, Houses of the Unholy. This highly anticipated, standalone crime thriller is set to release in August from Image Comics.
Brubaker and Phillips’ names have been stealing headlines left and right lately with The Hollywood Reporter’s buzzy scoop that Amazon has given a full series order to Criminal, with Brubaker co-showrunning and writing the pilot. Criminal is perhaps one of the most beloved comic book series in the pair’s catalog and first cemented them as an ‘auto-buy’ brand for many readers.
Now, their latest offering, Houses of the Unholy promises the team’s trademark crime noir storytelling, but with some darker, more sinister thriller twists than their usual fare.
"Houses of the Unholy is something I've been describing as Satanic Panic Noir. It's somewhere in-between a creepy horror story and a f*cked-up noir, and directly tied to the Satanic Panic craze of the '80s," said Brubaker. "The book really speaks to my obsessions with cult horror, and plays with the demonic tropes of classic horror from Hammer to Carpenter to Stephen King. The fear that was everywhere back then has clearly resurfaced, and that made me want to dive back into those dark waters and try to find a Brubaker-Phillips take on noir and horror at the same time."
In this new tale, an FBI agent from the cult crime beat and a woman with a past linked to the Satanic Panic are drawn into a terrifying hunt for an insane killer hiding in the shadows of the underworld.
This pulse-pounding story asks: can you ever escape your past, or are all your bad decisions just more ghosts to haunt you, wherever you go?
Houses of the Unholy (ISBN: 9781534327429) will be available at local comic book shops on Wednesday, August 14 and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Indigo on Tuesday, August 13.
Houses of the Unholy will also be available across many digital platforms, including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play.
Select praise for Brubaker & Phillips:
"Brubaker and Phillips's books have always been about eight years ahead of their time." —Brian K. Vaughan, SAGA, Paper Girls
"Brubaker & Phillips continue to make sweet music together, broadcast to you in the form of the best comics around." —Robert Kirkman, Invincible, The Walking Dead
"Ed and Sean are that rare longterm collaboration that never become complacent, each project is a new revelation, the love visibly increased, the enthusiasm for the craft only growing over time. You don't have to consider the purchase, you make it on instinct at this point." —Rick Remender, Deadly Class, Black Science
"Like Scorsese and De Niro, Brubaker and Phillips are the unmatched masters of a certain kind of storytelling—those fables of doomed and deluded men who are ready to die bloody, defending the tatters of their soiled American dreams. A new title from the sharpshooters behind Criminal and Fatale is reason enough to go on living." —Joe Hill, Locke & Key, Horns, NOS4A2
"Brubaker and Phillips have achieved the sort of creative consistency that'd justify critics filing their INSTANT CLASSIC reviews before they even read whatever they put out next." —Kieron Gillen, The Wicked + The Divine, Die
"I’ve been reading Ed Brubaker comics since the first appearance of Ed Brubaker comics and every single time he announces a new title I mutter to myself: 'ugh! I wish I would’ve thought of that!'" —Brian Michael Bendis, Powers
"I'm a pretty easy mark for any Brubaker-Philips creation..." —Jonathan Hickman, East of West, House of X
“Two of the best in the business, no contest.” —Kelly Sue DeConnick, Captain Marvel, B*tch Planet
Select praise for Brubaker & Phillips’ Where the Body Was:
"Prolific collaborators Brubaker and Phillips follow their surrealistic thriller Night Fever with this playfully experimental, though no less grittily gripping, stand-alone whodunit-style murder mystery set in a suburban neighborhood over the summer of 1984...VERDICT A fast-paced mystery, propelled by a fascinating cast of characters, that builds to a profoundly moving and deeply romantic climax. Absolutely not to be missed." —Library Journal, starred review
“A masterfully-told puzzle box mystery with a fiercely beating human heart.” —Jordan Harper, Edgar Award winning author of Everybody Knows and She Rides Shotgun
"Brubaker and Phillips have done it again—a crime story that somehow, in its twists, turns, and thrills, reminds us of the poignancy of lost dreams, missed connections, and a past we'll always crave but never return to." —Sara Gran, author of Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series
"Sean Phillips and Ed Brubaker represent the gold standard for comics noir—brutal, beautiful, and best." —Ian Rankin, bestselling author of the John Rebus books
Select praise for Brubaker & Phillips’ Night Fever:
“Night Fever pulled me in from the first moment with its razor sharp writing and gorgeous art. Brubaker and Phillips have crafted a taut, riveting story, as disturbing as it is satisfying, full of memorable lines and stunning images. Thought-provoking and highly entertaining.” ―Charles Yu, National Book Award winning author of Interior Chinatown
"Brubaker’s masterfully hardboiled scripting is both unnervingly nihilistic and propulsively thrilling, and Phillips’s illustration has rarely evoked such nuances of character or absolute menace. VERDICT Another masterwork from a collaborative team that seems increasingly incapable of producing anything less. —Library Journal
"Crackling, effortless style." ―Publishers Weekly
"The art is striking. Moody and noir, it also makes strong use of colors: one page contrasts yellow with dominant blues, purples, and blacks to illuminate graphic violence, while other pages use lighter tones to indicate Jonathan having a greater measure of control. Part mysterious crime story, part psychological drama, Night Fever is a haunting graphic novel in which a man tests his limits and realizes why they existed in the first place." ―Foreword Reviews
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