With a successful Kickstarter campaign completed, Comichaus (a new online indie comic book database), is set to release its own monthly anthology filled with amazing action and adventure from some of the UK’s most exciting small press creators. We were given a sneak peak at this dynamite new issue, including an exclusive first look at the cover by 2000 AD legend Glenn Fabry!

Publisher: Comichaus
Writer: Various
Artist: Various
Price: £5.00

Our rating: [star rating=”4.5″]

Having recently interviewed Comichaus’s Pete Genepool and James McCulloch  we were lucky enough to be given an early peek at the debut issue of the their new monthly Comichaus Anthology. This included a very early glimpse at it’s cover by the one and only Glen Fabry which we can share with you here –  well, if he’s good enough to cover the 2000^th prog of 2000AD this September, he’s good enough for Comichaus too!

This cover, along with other star name artists lined up for future covers (such as John McCrea and Carlos Ezquerra), can be seen as a confident and strong statement of intent by this newest of indie publishers. Editor Pete Genepool has gathered a stable of writers and artists from the UK indie press scene (people with experience and a growing fan base themselves) and let them run wild on the several short stories across this first issue.

Like the opener, Karyn Shade/Beyond Forth (written by James McCulloch and illustrated by Jessica Byrne), they are mostly first chapters in on-going stories that hope to entice the reader into returning for subsequent instalments. And, while the aforementioned strip is clearly rooted in the traditions of psychological horror, other strips clearly reflect the strengths, and indeed the varied tastes, of the different teams.

Jon Laight (writer) and Dan Butcher (artist), for example, paint a picture of a far flung dystopian future, in their sci-fi story, Suited and Booted, in which humankind had colonised the stars, only for aliens to colonise us in return, reducing the human population to dangerously low levels and enslaving them in the process. In Troubleshooters by Aaron Walther (writer) and Edwin Bickford (artist), we have a sci-fi/Western mash-up while the closing strip, Mum and Dad (writer, Tom Ward), is a terrifically twisted tale made all the more quirky thanks to the weirdly wonderful art of Ian Laurie. Of course, to say anything more would be blowing the bloody doors off, and we wouldn’t want to reveal too much of this promising, diverse first issue.

Having grown up with 2000AD during the 1980’s when Slaine and D.R. and Quinch were introduced as two very different types of strip to 2000AD’s usual fare, we recognised the fun to be had reading an anthology that wasn’t all of one type of genre. Comichaus Anthology #1 offers the reader a variety of different stories, different artistic visions and different voices too. Something for every comic fan? We think so, and a welcome break from our usual diet of spandex. Comichaus is an anthology with big ideas and bigger hopes, and a comic worth looking out for this summer when it is released.

Ask your local comic book store for copies, or head over to the comichaus.com/comic and order yours in advance.