For readers looking for their next high fantasy comic book adventure, your wait is almost over. Collider is excited to exclusively reveal that writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Chris Wildgoose will be collaborating on The Hunger and the Dusk, an epic high fantasy adventure full of drama, gore, and sweeping romance.
The new IDW series, which Wilson jokingly calls her "hot orc saga," is set in a world where humans and orcs live at odds with one another until a group of fearsome ancient humanoids known as the Vangol arrive and threaten everything they know. In order to survive, the orcs and the humans must band together and fight back.
The Hunger and the Dusk will follow Tara, an orc healer and cousin to the orc overlord Troth Icemane, and Callum Battlechild, a human commander. As the pair have to set aside a lifetime of prejudice and misconceptions and work together in common cause to ensure the survival of their people, both will be tested and challenged beyond all they've known. And as we know, where antagonistic sparks fly, sometimes sparks of a different sort fly as well.
The Inspiration for The Hunger and the Dusk
Series author Wilson is perhaps best known for her work on Ms. Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Poison Ivy, making this type of project a bit of a departure for her. Of her inspiration to finally write the story, Wilson says:
“During the pandemic, I thought a lot about the many different times in history when the world has come to an end. I was also revisiting the science fiction and fantasy comfort food that I grew up with, and bit by bit, almost like a bedtime story, this saga—with orcs and humans banding together in a world that is slowly becoming uninhabitable, with enemies facing the choice to stand together or die separately—began to take shape. Ordinarily, high fantasy is not something I write a lot of, but coming out of the pandemic, I thought, ‘To hell with it, death is coming for us all, do what you love. Write the hot orc saga.’ And here we are!”
For his part, Wildgoose — whose work includes Batgirl: Rebirth and Batman: Nightwalker — had nothing but praise for the world Wilson created, saying:
“My emotions are running high as The Hunger and the Dusk gets closer to finally being out into the wild. From the start, Willow handed me this lovely detailed lore bible of the Orc dynasties, their marriage ceremonies, what animals that the different tribes hunt, bits of their folklore, where they migrate in the winter. Then we have the humans, again their history, details on some of the cities we may or may not even see in the first series. It was everything I’d hoped for as a starting point and from there, Willow has let me work in my own high fantasy tastes. It feels like a seamless union of two nerdy fantasy fans, and I’ve loved every second of the collaboration so far.”
The Hunger and the Dusk debuts in July. Check out an additional variant cover below:
