Curt Pires and Jok Send Time-Traveling Monsters Into the Fighting Ring in Image's Creature Corps

Image Comics has announced Creature Corps, a new series from writer Curt Pires and artist Jok launching with an oversized 60-page first issue on December 2 for $4.99. The pitch mashes up creature-feature sci-fi with underground sports drama: monsters from a broken future keep falling backward through time into the present, and instead of studying them, humanity started forcing them into brutal battling leagues for entertainment.

The lead is Dusty Rockem, a former teenage champion in that world who walked away from the circuit years ago. When his mother's medical bills pile up, he's dragged back into the ring he swore off, and presumably back into whatever ugly business runs underneath it. Pires has described the tone as splitting the difference between 16-bit gaming nostalgia, The Boys-style deconstruction, and the time-hopping chaos of Back to the Future — which is a lot to promise from a first issue, but this is also a reunion for Pires and Jok, who previously teamed up on 51.

A tie-in trading card game is reportedly already in development, which suggests Image sees this as more than a one-off miniseries. Creator-owned launches with this much genre-blending ambition tend to be a coin flip at retail, but a proven art/writing pair and a built-in licensing angle make it worth a preorder look ahead of December.

Original reporting: AIPT.