NYCC ’24: Aaron and Asrar reunite for Image’s BUG WARS

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Image Comics has revealed writer Jason Aaron and artist Mahmud Asrar are reteaming on Bug Wars, a dark, six-part fantasy series beginning this February. Pitched by Aaron as a cross between Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Game of Thrones, the comic follows a boy forced to wage war in a tiny kingdom in his own backyard.

Bug Wars #1 ashcan cover by Mahmud Asrar

Slade Slaymaker is a kid from Alabama suddenly lost in a vicious world beyond his imagining, a world of marauding ant armies, spell-casting spider witches, and beetle-riding barbarians. A kingdom of tiny but deadly warriors hidden in his own backyard. The same world that saw his father eaten alive by insects and now plunges young Slade into the middle of a brutal Bug War to decide the fate of his family.

Aaron comments, “When I was a kid, our backyard was a wondrous place, where I spent hours imagining epic adventures, action figures scattered all through the grass. In a lot of ways, I still feel like that kid, running around the yard, making up stories. Only the stories have gotten a bit darker over the years. For Slade Slaymaker, the backyard of his home in Alabama turns out to be a place of terror and brutality, where sects of tiny sword-wielding Mytes and their armies of flesh-eating beetles and acid-spraying ants have declared war on his family.”

The book marks Aaron’s first creator-owned comic since last year’s BOOM! Studios saga Once Upon a Time at the End of the World, his first at Image since Sea of Stars concluded in 2021, and Asrar’s first there since Dynamo 5 (2007-2010).

Asrar, who previously worked with Aaron on Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, adds, “Bug Wars is the culmination of what I wanted to do in comics: a fantasy epic told with no holds barred. A tale where our imaginations run wild. A place where we reach the heights of escapism, all while keeping everything grounded with pure human emotion straight from the heart.”

The pair will have more to say about the series at this Sunday’s New York Comic Con panel, Image Comics Presents: Breaking Ground, which will be held in room 406.2 at 11 am. The two will also be respectively at tables H42 (Aaron) and D24 (Asrar) in Artist Alley, where they will be selling ashcan copies of the first issue while stocks last.

Bug Wars #1 will be released on February 12, 2025 with a host of covers by Asrar, Pepe Larraz, Peach Momoko, Tony S. Daniel, and Mike del Mundo, which you can check out below.