The True Weird backup features from James Tynion IV and Michael Avon Oeming’s Blue Book monthly will receive a collected edition in January 2025. Published by Dark Horse, True Weird Vol. 1 gathers twelve tales of the strange from an all-star lineup of creators. The 120-page trade paperback anthology will release January 28, 2025 in bookstores and January 29 from comic shops, retailing for $24.99.
The Dark Horse press release said:
“Dark Horse Books and Tiny Onion present True Weird Volume 1, a collection of black-and-white short comics originally featured as bonus stories throughout Blue Book series 1 and 2. Based on true accounts, these stories describe encounters with cryptids, ghosts, paranormal phenomena, medical oddities, and all manner of the strange.
“This new volume features twelve of the strangest “true” stories from the world around us, featuring an all-star lineup of creators including James Tynion IV, Klaus Janson, Chris Condon, Michael Avon Oeming, Ming Doyle, John McCrea, Genevieve Valentine, Aditya Bidikar, Anand RK, Gavin Fullerton, and many more.”
True Weird was originally published digitally via James Tynion IV’s Tiny Onion Substack, as a monthly anthology series for paid subscribers. It developed a a complement to his self-described “true weird” alien abduction series Blue Book, and were reprinted – then continued – as backup features within the Dark Horse print edition of Blue Book’s first two series.
Talking about True Weird when it was first announced on his Tiny Onion Substack in May 2022, Tynion IV said:
“These anthology stories are going to follow the same rough structure that we’re using in Blue Book. Every story we tell is going to be based on a real account of an encounter with the inexplicable, with minimal fictionalization and exaggeration. The key thing we’re trying to capture is the genuine weirdness at the heart of each story, no matter how unsettling or logic-defying it might be. The anthology stories are going to be one-and-done, with a different creative team on each chapter. To help capture the feel of old-school “STRANGE BUT TRUE” comics, and to help mark this as the spiritual cousin of BLUE BOOK, we’re going to be doing these stories in black and white. Our hope is that each of these stories makes you look at the world a little differently, that they make you wonder, and that they make you eager for each new chapter.”
