ALWAYS REMEMBER: HEAVY IS THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN . . . UNLESS THE KING IS ABOUT TO GET IT LOPPED OFF! Welcome, traveler . . . back to the blood-drenched ramparts of ye olde EC Comics that yearn for MORE tales of sadistic sorcery and malevolent magic! Yes, draw your sword and start swinging, because CRUEL KINGDOM lives again with an ALL-NEW volume of fatal fantasy, told in the immortal EC Comics manner by a magnificently malicious cast of all-star storytellers!In this CRUEL KINGDOM, there is no “happily ever after” . . . and sometimes the witch hunter becomes the hunter in the end, heh heh! Come, warm yourself by the pyre as vengeance-fueled writers David M. Booher (Canto), Matt Bors (The Toxic Avenger), and Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Dead Teenagers) turn the screws in tandem with axe-wielding artists Ryan Kelly (Lucifer), Lukas Ketner (Count Crowley), and David Lapham (Stray Bullets) to extract answers to the burning question of every knight and squire: Must every wizard’s tower also have an executioner’s dungeon buried down below? At EC Comics, we say, “YES, OF COURSE! NOW PROCEED WITH THE BEHEADING, YOU FOOL!”
Contributors: (W) David M. Booher; Matt Bors (A) Ryan Kelly; Lukas Ketner (CA) Yanick Paquette
Matt Bors is an Eisner-winning comics editor and two time Pulitzer Prize Finalist in cartooning. He is currently writing the upcoming Toxic Avenger comic book along with Justice Warriors, a dystopian satire created with artist Ben Clarkson from Ahoy Comics. In 2013, he founded The Nib, which published 6,000 comics, three books, and 15 issues of an award-winning print magazine. In 2017 he was the Executive Producer and head writer for two seasons of The Nib animation produced by Topic with Augenblick Studios. Bors’ comics have appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Village Voice, CNN, The Intercept, and were collected in the book We Should Improve Society Somewhat. He also drew the graphic novel War Is Boring, written by David Axe, and edits comics for In These Times magazine. , Jude Ellison S. Doyle is an author, journalist, and comic book writer living in upstate New York. Under his former pen name “Sady Doyle,” Jude founded the feminist blog Tiger Beatdown in 2008. He is the author of Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why (Melville House 2016), which has been called “smart, funny and fearless” (Boston Globe), “compelling” and “persuasive” (New York Times Book Review). The Atlantic predicted that “Trainwreck will very likely join the feminist canon.” Doyle’s second book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power (Melville House, 2019) was named a Best Non-Fiction Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and was shortlisted for Starburst Magazine’s Brave New Words award. His first non-fiction book under his real name, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, will be published by Melville House in the fall of 2025. In 2021, Jude published his first comic: Maw, a limited-series horror comic with artist A.L. Kaplan, for Boom! Studios. His follow-up, The Neighbors with artist Letizia Cadonici, was published in 2023, and was nominated for a 2024 GLAAD award for “Outstanding Comic.” Both are now available in collected editions, and Jude’s third series, Be Not Afraid with artist Lisandro Estherren, is forthcoming from BOOM! Studios.