William Gibson and Butch Guice dropping ‘Archangel’ for IDW in 2016.
Billy GibSon doing a fucking comic book with Butch Guice? Sign me the fuck up. It also doesn’t hurt that the synopsis portrays a comic out of its goddamn mind. Post-Apocalyptic World War II time-traveling…stuff? Okay!
A few months ago, IDW said that they were planning a comic series with author William Gibson, inventor of cyberspace and general prophet of the future we live in today. The publisher formally announced details of that comic at San Diego Comic-Con this past weekend. Archangel, with artist Butch Guice, will debut next year.
Guice, well known for his runs on Captain America and The Winter Soldier with Ed Brubaker at Marvel, is an impressive artist to pick for a project like this, and uniting him with Gibson suggests that IDW want to make this a real ‘event’ comic.
Originally planned as a screenplay with actor Michael St. John Smith — hence his cover credit — Archangel will now be published as a four-issue miniseries through IDW, set partly in 1945 during the final days of World War II, and partly in the present day, though apparently it will be a present day that looks quite startlingly different to the one we live in.
The official synopsis from IDW is as follows:
Archangel is a wild time travel romp between the closing days of World War II and a present day United States that doesn’t look a thing like our present day. Archangel is full of classic William Gibson plot twists, dialog, characters and settings. Post apocalyptic cyberpunk World War time travel storytelling at it’s finest.
Gibson is one of the best-known writers in science-fiction, rising to fame with his novel Neuromancer, and going on to write a series of acclaimed works that predicted many of the realities of modern life, including reality TV, the internet, cyberspace, and the eroding impact of the internet on the idea of the ‘nation state’. His arrival a IDW is no small deal. He describes the miniseries broadly as, “Band of Brothers Vs Blackwater.