Key Points
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IDW Dark will release new comic books based on Blumhouse movies.
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The Purge will be the first out of the gate in 2027, while M3GAN and Happy Death Day will follow.
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IDW Dark editor Heather Antos and The Purge comic writer Dan Watters tease what’s to come.
The Blumhouse of horrors is breaking into comic books.
As part of a new deal with IDW Publishing, the acclaimed Hollywood home for spooks and scares will bring its titles to IDW Dark, Entertainment Weekly has learned exclusively. Among the new slate from the horror imprint are comic offshoots for The Purge, M3GAN, and Happy Death Day.
IDW Dark lead editor Heather Antos tells EW the brand has been in talks with Blumhouse for more than a year. “They have so many great franchises and titles and filmmakers and characters of which there is so much room to tell additional stories,” she says.
Antos calls the new relationship symbiotic. Blumhouse, which is also developing a completely different horror comic, Boom Studios’ Something Is Killing the Children, into both a live-action movie and an adult animated TV series, recently announced plans to adapt the IDW Dark comic The Exorcism at 1600 Penn from Hannah Rose May into a live-action film. Now the studio moves on the reverse adaptation.
IDW Dark, too, already tapped into the movie-to-comic business with successful runs of titles inspired by Paramount’s horror library, like A Quiet Place and Smile.
The partnership begins with a comic based on The Purge films, set in a world where all crime in the United States — even murder — is legal for one night a year. The 2013 flagship film kickstarted a series of successors: The Purge: Anarchy (2014), The Purge: Election Year (2016), The First Purge (2018), and The Forever Purge (2021). There was even a USA TV series.
Eisner award–winning writer Dan Watters (Batman: Dark Patterns, TMNT: Shredder) and acclaimed artist Juan José Ryp (Wolverine: Blood Hunt, Ghost Rider: Vengeance Forever) are the creatives spearheading the Purge comic.
“I’m a really big horror nerd. It was my entry point into comics and geeky stuff to begin with,” Watters says. “I can’t tell you anything about Star Trek, can’t tell you anything about Star Wars, but I can tell you about every Friday the 13th movie and I can rank them for you. So once we started talking about the fact that there was this Blumhouse stuff in the works, I immediately went, ‘Well, what about Purge?'”
Specifics on the story are being kept under wraps until IDW Dark is ready to reveal art. However, Antos teases, “What we’re doing is an entirely new place and a new town, new environment than we’ve gotten to see explored in the Purge universe so far.”
As part of the partnership, Antos spoke with the filmmakers behind each of the Blumhouse properties to both further understand the essence of each one, but also to figure out which characters or premises might be off-limits. With Happy Death Day, for example, she met with director Christopher Landon.
“He got to tell me exactly what his plan is for Happy Death Day 3, should they ever get to do it,” Antos shares. “Are there ways in the comics that we can lean into that while also leaving room for them to tell the story that they want to tell should they get to?”
New York Times best-selling writer Tim Seeley (Hack/Slash, Venom War: Deadpool) will be the writer handling the Happy Death Day comic.
With the Purge comic, however, those filmmaker conversations became about maintaining the morality story. The purgers are not heroes. “They are the bad guys,” Antos says, “and they need to remain the bad guys in the story. That’s one of the things that excited both Dan and myself in exploring this world: finding different angles of the types of people who would engage in Purge Night and how they might not view themselves as the villains.”
For Watters, the comic medium became a way to delve inside the heads of the characters more than we’ve seen in the movies and TV series, whether through internal thoughts or narrations. “It’s something that is affecting everyone in the country at the same time, one night a year,” he says of Purge Night. “There’s so many things to deal with, so many things you have to do.”
Additional creatives involved in these comics are still coming together and will be announced in due course. But for M3GAN, Antos calls the dancing killer android “a comic book superstar.”
The first M3GAN movie became an instant hit when released in 2022, but the sequel’s dwindling box-office numbers in 2025 led to a digital at-home release for movie spinoff SOULM8TE. The comics medium offers the franchise a new kind of life.
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“The world needs more M3GAN stories,” Antos says. “She can do anything and go anywhere that we want her to. She has that uncanny valley appeal to her that works really, really well in the horror franchise. She is Katie’s companion. As Katie continues to get older, M3GAN is going to have to go with her to different things. So that means high school, that means all the things that go along with high school.”
What about prom? “I really want M3GAN at prom,” Antos replies. “I don’t know if we’ll get to do that, but I just personally want that. We’re talking with a writer that I think folks are gonna be really excited to see their name appear alongside M3GAN.”
“Quality storytelling experiences are always our top priority at IDW, so partnering with Blumhouse to expand our horror imprint was truly a no-brainer decision,” IDW CEO Davidi Jonas says in a statement. “Working with Blumhouse to continue exploring the compelling potential of their modern classics within the pages of the comics is a tremendous honor and the creative conversations have been exciting. I can’t wait for fans to feast their eyes on these stories.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
