Kull of Atlantis finally has a full creative team!
Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics has revealed that Mark Buckingham, the artist behind Miracleman and Fables, will draw the new Kull miniseries, with Eisner winner Dave Stewart on colors and writer John Arcudi’s scripts already finished.
Kull #1 arrives in early 2027!
This was all revealed at San Diego Comic Con 2026, where Buckingham was a surprise guest to Heroic Signatures’ Tides of the Tyrant King Panel. He walked onstage to a roar from Room 28DE after supreme creative editor Chris Butera teased “a legend of the industry.” For Butera, the hire was personal.
“Whenever you apply at Heroic, there’s a big thing you need to fill out to show your nerd cred: what do you love, how much do you love sword and sorcery, what are your favorite comics,” Butera said. “Topping my list of favorite comics has always been Fables. So having you on for Kull has been a very personal joy for me.”
Asked about his approach to “The Exile of Atlantis,” the story where Howard’s Kull saga begins, Buckingham made clear this book won’t look like anything else on the Heroic Signatures shelf.
“I’ve purposely wanted to bring something very different to this universe,” Buckingham said. “Conan is a big, brawny brute. Kull is lean. He ran with tigers as a child. There’s that leanness and grace of movement that comes with Kull, which is going to be really nice to convey in this book. I wanted it to have an elegance, a cleanness, but also a dynamic.”
The influences he rattled off span the whole history of the medium. “I’m bringing the darkness and the weight of Mignola. I’m bringing the dynamism of Kirby and his design instincts as well,” he said. Readers of his Fables run will recognize one signature move coming back: “You’ll be seeing the return of the border art that I always used to do on Fables, decorative elements and story elements within the edges of the frames.” Arthur Rackham and Alphonse Mucha are in the mood boards too, all in service of what he promised will still deliver the goods: “Battles with Lemurians, sea pirates, armies of skeletons, sea monsters: all the kind of stuff you’re gonna love in this book.”
That art nouveau streak runs through the whole package, starting with the brand-new series logo unveiled at the panel. “It has the barbarism that is inherent in all Howard stories, but there’s a decadence to it as well,” Butera said. “The way I keep referring to it is crumbling art nouveau.” Buckingham saw the finished logo for the first time that morning: “It just sums up everything about the book so beautifully.”
Heroic Signatures president Marcos Cronander laid out why decadence is being sought after. “With Kull, people just think it’s Conan with a scar or a different haircut,” Cronander said. To fight that, the company spent years building the world before a single page was drawn. “We worked with our Robert E. Howard scholars and started really trying to flesh out what makes Conan’s world and Kull’s world different.”
The answer is Valusia itself. Kull’s Thurian Age reads as higher fantasy than Conan’s Hyborian Age, and its greatest empire is already rotting from the inside. “It’s supposed to have this opulent, rich feel,” Cronander said, “but as we know in Robert E. Howard, the more opulent and powerful, the more corrupted it often is.” His Atlanteans are nothing like the psychic-dolphin set from pop culture, either: they’re primitive and savage, which is exactly why an Atlantean barbarian seizing the Valusian throne has to grapple with the “civilized” ways of his new court.
Then there are the Lemurians, a race Cronander described with glee: “Their eyes are a little too big, maybe their skin’s slightly off, and they have slightly webbed fingers. That’s stuff you don’t get in Conan’s world. He fights a monster, a sorcerer. In Kull’s world, there are whole other cultures out there.”
Even the animals are getting this treatment. Howard scholar Jeff Shanks reminded the team that Kull’s era sits thousands of years before Conan’s, which itself sits thousands of years before ours, so the concept art leans into Pleistocene wildlife, right down to horses whose hooves aren’t quite right. Longtime readers have already visited this era, Cronander noted, when Conan was thrown back through time to the Thurian Age in Age Unconquered.
Rounding out the team are editors David Hedgecock and Chase Marotz, the duo behind Savage Sword of Conan: Reforged, and Stewart, whose colors will, in Butera’s words, “bring the vibrancy to the Thurian Age.” As for Arcudi, whose involvement was announced last year: “His scripts have all been turned in, and they are excellent,” Butera said. “It is an epic that I cannot wait for you all to read.” Buckingham agreed from the drawing board: “I read his stories and they just play out in your mind immediately. The clarity, the vision, the pacing’s so perfect.”
The panel closed the segment with a color sneak peek, including a Lemurian battle page, and a promise from Buckingham that the pages aren’t done yet: “There’ll be more to unveil soon. I promise.”
Kull #1 hits shops in early 2027.
By that axe, he’ll rule again.
