Exclusive: We’ve got pages from the Locke & Key team’s new Tales Of The Darkside

In 2013, The CW announced that it was developing a reboot of 1980s horror anthology Tales From The Darkside with writer Joe Hill and producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci as executive producers. Hill would take on the role of creative director and write a few episodes, but the show never went further than its initial pilot order. Cut to June 2016, and those scripts have found a second life as the foundation for a new four-issue Tales From The Darkside miniseries from IDW, a project that is especially exciting because it reunites Hill with his Locke & Key artist Gabriel Rodriguez.

These preview pages from next week’s Tales From The Darkside #1 show how well-suited Rodriguez is to Hill’s scripting style, rendering the world of this story in meticulous detail while bringing extra energy to the visuals with bold, inventive layouts. Michael Benedetto adapts Hill’s TV script for comics, and the narration covers a lot of ground in these pages. The specificity of the artwork, including the muted palette of colorist Ryan Hill, gives all those plot points dramatic weight, and there’s an undeniable sense of foreboding in this excerpt. Rodriguez has evolved considerably since the conclusion of Locke & Key, and the most intriguing aspect of this new trip to the Darkside is seeing how Rodriguez’s growth amplifies the impact of Hill’s stories.