Sir Edward Grey Returns In Witchfinder: Gates Of Heaven By Roberson And D’Israeli

Dark Horse have announced that we won’t have to wait long to dive back into the Mignolaverse and the life and times of Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder. In fact, we’ll be getting a new five issue series written by Chris Roberson, who brought us our last Witchfinder series, and illustrated by the British artist D’Israeli in Witchfinder: Gates of Heaven.

Roberson took to Twitter for a live Q&A about the comic on the day it was announced, and Comicon.com took part in learning more about what’s coming up. For instance, the series will be set in the UK, but have lots of flashbacks to other times and places, and it will take place during Grey’s earlier career, though he will have been investigating the paranormal for around 10 years at the time this story takes place. You can find that conversation thread, right here.
More expansively, Roberson has also released an open letter about his enthusiasm for Witchfinder, and what we’ll find coming up in Gates of Heaven.

We’ll provide that for you in full, below:

The world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy is full of fantastic characters, from pulp adventurers like Lobster Johnson to the agents of the B.P.R.D., to the big red guy himself, but of them all my personal favorite has always been Sir Edward Grey, Queen Victoria’s personal Witchfinder. I’ve always been a sucker for stories set in Victorian England, and in particular Victorian-era stories with science-fictional or supernatural elements, and so when Mike first mentioned that there had been a Victorian-era occult detective in Hellboy’s world in the pages of Wake the Devil, I was immediately intrigued.

When I read Witchfinder: In The Service of Angels, it felt like Mike and his collaborator Ben Stenbeck had created a comic specifically for me. It had everything that I was obsessed with: occult detectives, secret societies, steampunk technology, ancient mysteries and cursed artifacts, ghosts and monsters and demons and on and on and on. Each new volume of Witchfinder only served to make Sir Edward’s era richer and more compelling, and each time it seemed like the books were being created expressly for my personal enjoyment. When I was first given the opportunity to pitch a story set in Hellboy’s world a few years ago, I jumped at the chance to propose a Witchfinder story, and was lucky enough to work with Mike and Ben Stenbeck on City of The Dead, and to fill it with all of the things I love about Sir Edward and his world.

When we started discussing the story that would ultimately become Witchfinder: The Gates of Heaven, I immediately suggested that D’Israeli would be the perfect artist to draw the book, and was thrilled when he agreed to take the project on. Like all of the previous volumes of Witchfinder, The Gates of Heaven is a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and end, but there are connections throughout to both Sir Edward’s earlier adventures and also to other stories that have featured Hellboy, the B.P.R.D., and other players in that world. We learn that the world that Sir Edward inhabits is bigger and stranger than we ever knew, and that there are far more things going on in the shadows than Sir Edward himself has ever suspected, both abroad and close to home. There is a killer stalking the fog-wrapped streets of London, and inexplicable artifacts are going missing from museums and private collections all over the city. Sir Edward must discover if the sinister Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra is behind it all, and if not, then who? And who or what is the secretive Foundry?

Best,

Chris Roberson

Look forward to Witchfinder: Gates of Heaven #1 (of 5) on sale May 23rd, 2018!