Oni Press may have an ambitious 2024 planned, but that isn't stopping the publisher from looking ahead to 2025. IGN can exclusively reveal that Oni is teaming with Daniel Noah and Elijah Wood's production company SpectreVision (behind films like Mandy and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) for a new comic book imprint called High Strangeness that will debut in 2025.
Similar to Gerard Way's Young Animal imprint at DC, High Strangeness is billed as a "pop-up imprint" that will feature several comics linked by a common theme. In this case, High Strangeness will focus on horror and sci-fi stories influenced by documented cases of paranormal activity. Oni's press release promises that the imprint "will surveil the liminal spaces where reality, hallucination, science and mythology give way to cosmic wonder and existential terror, bending perception far beyond the bounds of traditional science fiction and horror."
While it's too early for Oni to announce specific books or creative teams, they did reveal that podcaster Jim Perry, the host of the audio documentary Euphomet, will serve as Creative Consultant for the High Strangeness line.
“Accounts from experiencers of the paranormal suggest a vast, interconnected narrative unfolding at the farthest reaches of human experience – from UFOs, to cryptid sightings, to patterns of synchronicities that point to an invisible architecture underlying our reality,” said Noah in a statement. “As an experiencer myself, I know firsthand that the world of high strangeness can have profound implications. We’re galvanized to explore this remarkable space with our partners at Oni.”
“Comics feel uniquely suited to explore the wide-ranging spectrum of paranormal phenomena, utilizing the boundless possibilities of the medium to give form to the often Gaussian accounts of that which we cannot explain through traditional means,” said Wood.
“Over the past decade, so many members of the Oni team and greater comics community have been inspired and influenced by SpectreVision’s extraordinary body of work. Together, we share a mutual fascination with the extremities of human understanding – where aliens, poltergeists, demons, fairies, and other entities all seem to extend like fingers from a hidden hand,” said Hunter Gorinson, President and Publisher of Oni Press. “Through the uniquely powerful lens of comic storytelling, we intend to tell an array of stories exploring these multiple manifestations, but rooted in the same common understanding: Reality is thin around the edges . . . and if we press hard enough in exactly the right places, it just might shatter.”
Comic book fans can learn more about High Strangeness at L.A. Comic-Con this weekend. Both Noah and Wood will attend a panel on Sunday, December 3 at 12:00pm PT in Room 304.
In other comic book news, Marvel has just rewritten the history of Nightcrawler and Mystique, and fans have made a shocking discovery about the cover to The Dark Knight Returns #1.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
