Dark Horse to publish Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories

SciFi Wire reports that Dark Horse Comics will publish Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser fantasy stories, both in prose and comic formats:

"Basically we will reprint the original [novels and collections], probably at the rate of three per year," Richardson said in an interview. "Also, preceding that, we will be republishing [the 1991 Marvel Comics] comic [penciled by Mike Mignola and scripted by Howard Chaykin]. That will appear later this year, the entire series in book form."

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two sword-and-sorcery heroes created by and based on Fritz Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer. Their first story appeared in 1939 and the last in a book called The Knight and Knave of Swords, published in 1988. The stories often had a dark sense of humor, which ranged from the subtle and character-based to the Pythonesque. I remember buying the Chaykin/Mignola stories when they first came out, and as you can imagine with a team like that, they were pretty wonderful.

In addition, Dark Horse will publish a new series based on the duo:

Dark Horse will also be launching a brand-new comic-book series for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, which will feature graphic adaptations of the original Leiber stories, as well as original material. "[We'll probably be] using the same format and marketing plan that we used for [our] Conan [series]," Richardson said. "In other words, launching it with a 25-cent comic, and then going into a regular series. [With Conan,] we stripped everything back to Robert E. Howard's [original work]. We started the [comic] book at the beginning of his life, and then we basically go through his life, and at each point where one of the [original] stories [occurs], [we] incorporated [that] into the comic-book canon of his life. We'll be doing the same thing with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, where the stories in the novels and short stories will end up appearing in the comics, but we will [also] be fleshing out their entire lives and their entire story."

Dark Horse is also working on getting the rights to King Kull and Solomon Kane, two other Robert E. Howard properties.