The Goon is coming to a library shelf near you: Dark Horse Comics will release a deluxe hardcover library edition of Eric Powell’s Eisner Award-winning dark comedy in November 2015.
The library edition will collect The Goon: Rough Stuff (vol. 0), Nothin’ but Misery (vol. 1), My Murderous Childhood (vol. 2), and Heaps of Ruination (vol. 3). The hero of the series, which author-artist Powell created in 1999, is a mob enforcer out of a 1930s movie, except that he spends his time fighting the supernatural – monsters and zombies, just for starters.
Powell told PW that he started the Goon when he was a struggling young cartoonist and “all my jobs had dried up. I decided to just do whatever I wanted to do – noir, horror, comedy, and monsters – and just squash it all together.” While the series spotlights the comical team of the the Goon and his pal Frankie, Powell said, the series “isn’t always funny. I wanted to be able to tell any story, funny, tragic, sci-fi or horror. I jump around and somehow manage to shoehorn it all in.”
In 2012, Powell ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $400,000 to fund a full-length animated Goon feature. He is working with the animation house Blur Studios and film director David Fincher to create the film; the team recently produced an animatic – a rough, storyboarded animation of the film that can be shown to studios.
Next year, in addition to the Goon library editions, Powell said fans can expect the finale of Once Upon a Hard Time, the last episode of the most recent Goon mini-series. “It’s the culmination of all the Goon’s story lines,” he explained. “It’s a major milestone in the series; and while the Goon is not ending, this is an ending of sorts.”
Dark Horse launched its line of Library Editions in 2008 with Mike Mignola’s Hellboy Library Edition vol.1. The line of oversized hardcovers also includes Joss Whedon’s Buffy Library Edition and The Last Airbender Library Edition. A Dark Horse spokesperson said the company has sold more than 200,000 copies of the books produced in the format.
