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IDW recently launched the IDW Dark line, which focuses on publishing new horror comics built around both original ideas and established film properties. Of these books, writer Christian Ward’s Event Horizon books have arguably been the breakout hits. They prove just how hungry Event Horizon fans are for new tales set in this cosmic horror universe.
Today at Comic-Con, IDW revealed the third and final chapter in Ward’s trilogy of Event Horizon follow-ups. The saga that began in 2025’s Event Horizon: Dark Descent and is currently continuing in Event Horizon: Inferno will conclude in a new limited series called Event Horizon: Pandemonium. What’s more, this third volume has easily the best elevator pitch of them all. We’ve already experienced the Hell of this terrifying universe. But what if Heaven also existed, and were somehow even worse?
Event Horizon: Pandemonium is written by Ward and features art by Hernán González (John Carpenter’s Tales for a Halloween Night). Ward also draws the cover art.
IGN was able to speak to Ward at SDCC to learn more about this new series and how Pandemonium was always the endgame of his Event Horizon plans. As he explains, he was laying the groundwork for Pandemonium even in Dark Descent.
“My view was, I need to introduce something that answers some questions, but opens up a lot more,” Ward tells IGN. “And by doing that, once I did that, it exploded the law. Okay, well then what is the journey? Are we going to do Dark Descent, which is what happened to the ship [before the film]? But then what happened after the ship? And then where do we go from there? So when I put the pitch in of what I wanted for Dark Descent, there was an appendix that suggested, where would we go? And that’s what we’re doing. We’re following that roadmap. It’s been really satisfying.”
Again, Pandemonium has a very evocative premise in a franchise that’s already built around a strong fundamental idea. In the original film, humanity’s discovery of faster-than-light travel literally tears open the barriers between our reality and a Lovecraftian Hell dimension. But Pandemonium posits that this universe also has its own version of Heaven, and it’s one that’s somehow even worse than Hell. Ward reveals that he was inspired by Biblical descriptions of angels and God for his depiction of this realm.
“Heaven is worse. Heaven is definitely worse,” Ward teases. “So yeah, basically it was the whole thing. The thing that is my Event Horizon, my rules that I’ve set in place is this idea of older news. All the horror is based around lots of really old Biblical notions of Heaven and Hell. So it was about then, and if you look at a Biblically accurate description of an angel, it is terrifying. Terrifying.”
Ward continues, “So it wasn’t hard to then go, OK, but I’m treating Heaven as a kind of alien place, a place where humans really shouldn’t be. It’s more of a place of it’s alien – it’s overwhelmingly cosmic horror. So I’m really kind of leaning into that and I’m kind of connecting it with the threads that I’ve kind of been laying with Inferno, with Dark Descent. But it’s very much going back to kind of Biblically accurate and going, OK, but that’s scary. And even if you look at some of the descriptions of God, he’s described as you cannot look at his face.”
Obviously, with Event Horizon: Inferno still in progress, Ward can only reveal so much about how the series ends and sets the stage for Pandemonium. But he does tease that issue #4 (due out August 5) is a watershed moment for the series.
“Issue #4, which we’re getting close to now, is the one that’s the real swing,” Ward says. “Because I think what’s really interesting about the Event Horizon film is straight off the bat, we’re talking about the ship being alive. Yeah. The ship’s alive. So if the ship’s alive, then it’s a character. And Dark Descent was very much about really the origin of how is the ship alive. And so we’re going to kind of circle back to that quite a lot and deal with that. But as far as issue #5 goes, I mean, I would say all hell hits that fan. I said right from the get-go that this was my Aliens to Alien.”
Finally, Ward teases that the artwork in Pandemonium is going to be a major departure from what fans have seen in the previous two books, describing it as another “big swing” that takes the series in some surprising visual and narrative directions.
“When people see the first page of Volume 3, Issue #1, they are going to be surprised,” Ward promises. “I love that. Because we’re not going to be in a place you expect. We’re going to open in 17th century London. What? And the first character we see will be a Sir Isaac Newton. Wow. Because as you know, he’s very much associated with a little thing called gravity. I don’t know whether Dr. Ware would’ve been the first one to have created the Gravity Drive. Maybe. Maybe there might have been somebody before that that had a go with it. Who knows?”
Event Horizon: Pandemonium #1 will be released in December 2026, with a final order cutoff of October 19. You can preorder a copy at your local comic shop.
Check out IGN’s SDCC hub page for more coverage from the convention, including a first look at Hasbro’s Legend of Zelda figures and early details on the new Maximum X-Men comic.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket byfollowing @jschedeen on BlueSky.
