I’d fallen behind on everything that’s being offered at Thrillbent recently, which was a mistake considering the new material that’s joined Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable in recent weeks. Being a Leverage and Dungeons & Dragons fan (The IDW series of the same name for the latter, sadly; start talking to me about 20-sided die and I’ll just have to nod politely and shamefully admit that I’m lost), it’s no surprise that Arcanum is a particular favorite standing out for me amongst the new strips, thanks to the presence of writer John Rogers. As is his wont – as listeners of the Leverage 10 podcast or readers of Rogers’ Kung-Fu Monkey know – he’s not only writing the new magic invasion series, but writing about the series, spilling beans and lifting the curtain on some of the thinking behind it to give the rest of us a peek. Here’s Rogers selling the series in one simple paragraph:
If anything even vaguely resembling alien tech were discovered, you’d see the US government immediately put two programs in play: 1.) a Manhattan project to unravel the broken physics of said tech and 2.) a secret military/intelligence agency to keep tabs on it. Just substitute “magic” into those sentences and you have Arcanum.
You can find those process blog posts here and the actual Arcanum comic here. Both are recommended.




















