Welcome to the Yard

Notes on the release of BUG WARS #1

Feb 12, 2025

I’ve been waiting for this day for a very long time. Since I was 10 years old, running around our huge backyard in Piney Woods, Alabama. Exploring the woods or sitting inside the pine straw lean-to I’d made on a hill overlooking a winding stream, imagining I was Tarzan or Wildboy from the Krofft Supershow. Organizing elaborate battles with my Star Wars figures and G.I. Joes in the unmowed grass or the ditch that ran along the side of our dead-end street. Searching the brush until I found the perfect stick-sword, then spending the day hacking through the kudzu like I was Conan laying waste to a zombie horde.

For a few profoundly-formative years, that yard and those woods were my entire world. My Middle Earth and Tatooine and Road Warrior wasteland all rolled into one. Every morning, the yard transformed into whatever landscape I needed it to be, to tell whatever story I could dream up. Looking back now, I feel like that yard was my origin story as a writer. In some ways, I think I’m still there, spending the days imagining grand sagas and sprawling space wars for my own amusement.

BUG WARS is more of a product of that yard than any comic I’ve ever written. In many ways, it’s one of the most personal stories I’ve ever told.

It’s also a pretty kick-ass action, adventure and horror comic, wrapped in dark fantasy, set within a magical kingdom that’s somehow hidden in the grass right outside your doorstep.

The Yard of BUG WARS is my same yard from when I was 10 years old. Same brush pile, same shed overgrown with honeysuckle, same blackened trash barrel. Same wondrous landscape full of swords and sorcery and monsters beyond belief, waiting to be discovered.

So it is with a great thrill that I invite you to join me in my yard. In The Yard.

Along with my co-creator, artist Mahmud Asrar, plus colorist Matthew Wilson, designer and letterer Becca Carey, and editor Heather Antos, not to mention our A-list crew of variant cover artists, we’ve cooked up what we believe is quite the adventure for you.

And it’s available in comic book stores as of today!

Better grab your copies from your local comic shop as soon as possible, because word came earlier this week that BUG WARS #1 is completely sold out at the distributor level. So once your store runs out of those first printings, there’s no more to be had.

Though a second printing will be coming next month, just in time for issue #2.

Speaking of issue #2 and the future of BUG WARS, here’s a peak at what’s to come:

BUG WARS #2 Cover A by Mahmud Asrar & Matthew Wilson.

BUG WARS #2 Cover B by Yanick Paquette & Matthew Wilson.

BUG WARS #2 Cover C 1:25 by Tony Daniel & Marcelo Maiolo.

BUG WARS #3 Cover A by Mahmud Asrar & Matthew Wilson.

BUG WARS #3 Cover B by Adam Kubert & Laura Martin.

Mahmud has completely finished the first five issues and is currently working away on the sixth issue finale. The finale of BOOK ONE, that is. As there’ll be many more Wars to come.

And if you wanna get your copies of BUG WARS signed, then look for me as I hit two of the country’s best comic book shops in the next couple weeks: