Warning! Preview images for Man-Eaters: The Cursed #1 below!
Image Comics has announced Man-Eaters: The Cursed and given Screen Rant an exclusive preview of the first issue. The bestselling series Man-Eaters is making a return with the original team coming back to pen a new miniseries. Maude, the feminist teenager whom fans have come to love, is back and she's going to...camp?
Man-Eaters initially began publishing in 2018 and ran for twelve issues, concluding in 2019. The series revolves around the idea that women can suffer from "Pantherism" as a result of hormonal fluctuations associated with menses, following the onset of puberty. In the world of this series from Image Comics, women have been affected by the "mutation of Toxoplasmosis" as a result of being near or touching cats and changing litter boxes. The series explored gender stereotypes, feminism, and capitalist exploitation. Now, it's coming back with a brand new adventure for the story's heroine, Maude.
Chelsea Cain, Lia Miternique, Kate Niemczyk, Rachelle Rosenberg, and Joe Caramagna are reuniting to bring fans Man-Eaters: The Cursed. This will be a five-issue miniseries from Image Comics. In the initial series, Maude was undergoing puberty and struggling with societal pressures onset by Estro-Corp - a corporation that vilified women for profit. Now, her parents are sending her to camp and forcing her to face a brand-new threat. The first issue of this Image Comics series will release July 14th. Check out the series summary and exclusive preview here:
MAN-EATERS CURSED reunites the original MAN-EATERS creative team for another tale of adolescent feminist derring-do and supernatural hijinks. Maude, now 15, is sent to Craft Camp for the week. It goes south pretty quickly. Smart, laugh-out-loud funny, provocative, referential, scary, chock-full of ephemera, and compulsively re-readable. Plus, fairies. [ADVISORY: Do not read this book while you are actually camping.]
Man-Eaters is known for its unique presentation of its story, combining traditional comic writing and art with advertisements, drawings, poems, and other ephemera. This method not only helps tell the story in an interesting way, but also highlights the deep-seated roots that went into building the paranoia of the society within the Image Comic series. This upcoming miniseries promises the same hybrid storytelling approach.
Regarding the map splash shown above, Lia Miternique - one of the artists of the series - said:
"Creating the supplemental artwork, like the map, for The Cursed is the best kind of collaboration! We only have so many pages to tell such a layered story and these elements help fill in the details of the world. When I get a script from Chelsea I'm so excited to see where 'my pieces' will show up, and then it becomes this fantastic, creative back and forth between us to get the visual to do its work conveying humor and tone and story. Chelsea gives readers this opportunity to get invested in the characters and narrative in such a unique way—I just love being a part of that!!"
Chelsea Cain –known for writing Man-Eaters and Killer Mermaids - shares in that excitement for the map spread, saying she loves, "these two pages because they show the range of what we do."
"The map was all Lia Miternique. We started by gathering references for the right look. Then basically Lia started mapping and sending me what she had, and then I'd look for ways to make it funnier. Lia and I love maps. It is a thing we have in common. We also love paper that looks distressed, that feels like it's been in the world. One of the great things about having a graphic designer on our team is that we're able to bring a 'realistic' look to some of our materials. We have seeded so many little pay-offs in this map. It still makes me laugh out loud, and believe me I've looked at it a lot."
Cain added that, "Maude in bed--with the little flashback of tiny Maude in the middle—is one of my favorite layouts. That tiny Maude is just so cute, it kills me. And the coloring! Rachelle Rosenberg brings so much depth and visual interest with the patterns. It's beautiful. It's also a nice pause—one extended moment—which was important because there is a lot of motion in this arc." That page, shared in the preview above, is beautiful and it provides a peek at the supernatural element that Maude will be facing in her latest adventure.
Fans of Image Comics' Man-Eaters will be excited to hear about the return not only of the team, but of Maude. Even though Estro-Corp's leadership and true motivations have been uncovered, the transformation of women during their menstrual cycles still occurs. The world's population was taken advantage of, but that doesn't change the fact that women are still predatory hunters for a limited amount of time. Yet there are more threats to be faced, if the fairies are as problematic as this exclusive preview suggests. Man-Eaters: The Cursed #1 from Image Comics will release July 24, 2021.