At the San Diego Comic-Con Dark Horse Comics unveiled nearly 20 new publishing initiatives including a 12-issue Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 11 series that debuts this November with the continuing adventures of TV’s most fascinating supernatural dectective.  It’s been thirteen years since the cancellation of the Buffy TV series, but Joss Whedon has managed to continue her adventures by supervising the writing of scripts for the Dark Horse Comics series.  Season 10’s creative team of writer Christo Gage and artist Rebekah Isaacs return for Season 11, which finds Buffy and her friends, the Scoobies, living in San Francisco.

Among the most original projects announced at San Diego was John Arcudi and Tom Fejzula’s Dead Inside, a five-issue police procedural that debuts in December and focuses on Linda Caruso, a police detective charged with solving a murder committed in prison.  Caruso is part of the Jail Crimes Investigation Unit and she has to investigate a murder in the toughest possible environment in this gritty realistic drama that proves once again that comics don’t need heroes in tights to be compelling.

Dark Horse, which published a hardcover The World of the Witcher in 2015, continues its work with the gaming franchise based on the fantasy novels of Andrzej Sapkowski with Gwent: The Art of the Witcher Card Game, a lavish compendium of illustrations for the dark fantasy art based on the card game featured in the eagerly-awaited The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video game that debuts in September.  Gwent: The Art of the Witcher Card Game is due in stores in February, 2017 along with an 8.5” bust of Geralt, the protagonist of the Witcher video RPG.

Also due in February of 2017 is He-Man and The Masters of the Universe: The Newspaper Comic Strips, a collection of the newspaper comic strips that continued the He-Man story beyond the end of the original He-Man animated series and the start of the New Adventures of He-Man in the 1990s.  This volume of newspaper comics will be followed by a Character Guide and World Compendium filled with all sorts of details about the He-Man Universe. 

In addition Dark Horse Deluxe announced the 25th deluxe figure in a series of sculptures based on the characters in HBO’s mega-hit Game of Thrones—Son of Harpy.   The masked figure is a member of The Sons of The Harpy, an insurgency group fighting the rule of Daenerys Targaryen over Meereen.  They take their name the harpy, the heraldic symbol of the slave masters in the Ghiscari cities of Slaver’s Bay, and they conceal their identities by wearing golden masks with horned faces resembling harpies.

For other Dark Horse Comic-Con announcements, see “Dark Horse Plans Graphic Novel & Art Book for ‘Overwatch’,” “’Serenity:  No Power in the Verse’,” “Eric Powell Serves Up Some Fresh ‘Chimichanga’,” and “’World of Warcraft:  Chronicle II’.”