Dead Kings is a new title from Aftershock by Steve Orlando and Matthew Dow Smith about the nightmare world in the aftermath of global war of magic and technology.

Author Steve Orlando says:

DEAD KINGS is a Post-Post-Apocalypse. The human spirit, and species, is enduring, even after we’ve invoked science and sorcery to drive ourselves to global war. In DEAD KINGS, there is no mystery to magic, it’s simply assets and technology, and like any other type of dangerous technology, we’ve abused it to create massive diesel-punk war machines that nearly destroyed the world. But the world’s crawling back, and in Thrice-Nine, the kingdom that used to be the Slavic Empire, anarchy rules. The Oprichniki, Secret Police without a Captain, run the loose nation as a police state, the Wild Wild East…rounding up anyone who disagrees with them or lives against their standards. The worlds been burnt and born again, but these human drives remain. Sasha Vasnetsov is on a quest to free his brother Gena from a work camp for the socially regressive. He never accepted Gena until he was kidnapped, and now Sasha has promised to liberate his brother and return with him to their mother before the end of her fiftieth year. He’s going to need help…and he finds it in Maria Kamenaya, an abandoned iron soldier and survivor of the Great Iron War that almost killed the world.

This is Russian Folklore to the tune of Blade Runner 2049, and it’s going to take you to a world you’ve never seen…the world a generation after the end of the world, where the first sprouts of goodness are fighting to grow up through the cracks.

Please, come with us, and help them thrive.

Dead Kings debuts in October.

Official PR follows:

DEAD KINGS #1 / $3.99 / 32 pages / color / on sale 10.24.18

Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Matthew Dow Smith
Colorist: Lauren Affe
Letterer: Thomas Mauer
Cover A: Matthew Dow Smith
Cover B: Michael Gaydos


Thrice-Nine took Sasha’s brother, and it took Maria’s heart.

Plagued by the ramifications of a techno-magic world now thirty years gone, Thrice-Nine is a dirty folklore world that limps along, degenerating into a place filled with paranoia and poison. Sasha Vasnetsov thought he’d escaped all that, but when news comes that his younger brother has been kidnapped by the secret police, he finds himself dragged back into the madness with a simple goal—to find his brother.

But Sasha is going to need help to do this, and he enlists Maria Kamenaya, a former warrior with hundreds of enemy kills to her name, who was betrayed by the very country she served. This quest is how they get both of those things back, in the lawless land of decapitated states…the land of DEAD KINGS.

Written by Steve Orlando (Batman/Shadow, Crude, Midnighter, VIRGIL) and drawn by Matthew Dow Smith (October Girl, Suicide Squad, X-Files) DEAD KINGS is an in-depth exploration of retribution, in all its dark, complex forms.


  1. Sounds alright! Usually magic is a turn-off for me, but mentioning Blade Runner 2049 and the cracks of something new shining through… cool. The exotic East; check. Worth listening out for.

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