Today’s Image Expo saw a slew of new comic books announced, chief among them a new series from writer Jonathan Hickman with artist Tomm Coker called The Black Monday Murders.

The Synopsis

The Interview

The series is described as an adult Harry Potter where the secret schools of magic are actually big banks that control society. Black Monday of course refers to the global financial crisis that hit on Monday, October 19, 1987.This is Hickman’s first new comic after leaving Marvel Comics upon the conclusion of his years long Avengers saga that ended with the massive Secret Wars event. He’s also known for his groundbreaking work on Fantastic Four and his other Image books East of West and The Manhattan Projects.You might remember Coker from Marvel’s Daredevil Noir or Image’s Undying Love and Near Death.We’ve got the synopsis for the comic, plus your first interview with the creative team, conducted over email, who talk about how they came to work together and where they got this bizarre idea.All hail god money! From Jonathan Hickman (EAST OF WEST, Secret Wars, Avengers) and Tomm Coker (Undying Love) comes a mythical reinterpretation of modern global economics.THE BLACK MONDAY MURDERS is classic occult indoctrination where the secret schools of magic are actually clandestine banking cartels who control all of society—a hidden world where vampire Russian oligarchs, Black Popes, enchanted American aristocrats, and hitmen from the International Monetary Fund work together to keep ALL OF US in our rightful place.Each issue contains world-expanding bonus content like maps, corporate organization charts, decoded apocrypha, and stock tips to die for.THE BLACK MONDAY MURDERS is a brand new, crypto-noir series about dirty, filthy, money... and what kind of people you can buy with it.Twitter. I was putting my daughter to bed when suddenly my phone erupted with texts and calls, “It’s Jonathan Hickman, he wants to know what you’re working on!!!” So, the next day I signed up for Twitter, sent my first Tweet letting Jonathan know I wasn’t working on any comics at the moment and he asked if I’d be interested in working on TBMM.Yeah. It’s about the only thing that Twitter is actually good for, aggregation. I was actually just looking for someone who could do some version of what Tomm can and took a flier. I honestly had no idea he’d be available. I’m a big fan, so this has been really nice.Tomm’s one of those guys who’s an absolute monster and deserves a much, much bigger audience. So, hopefully this will be the one. It feels like it.I’ve been working on it for almost two years now. I was doing some research for another project, and had to some historical reading on economics. I came across something I thought was interesting about how a lot of the first recorded words, you know, things written down — documented — were basically bank notes.I loved the idea that money, which has no real value beyond exchanging influence, or better put, power, was the soul of all communication. Which, if you look at how people define magic: “as having the power to influence people or things by mysterious forces,” and how language is used as a summoning agent in most stories about magic, then it’s really easy to distill the source down to God Money.Anyway, I loved the idea that the ‘real’ reason super wealthy people on average, live longer, eat better, have more influence, etc…, is because they’re bartered their souls making an unholy alliance.Well, that it’s real is secondary. I mean, sure, that’s a hook, but the story is about a specific economic event that happened and the fallout of why it occurred.It absolutely is. I think you can make a very good argument that global democratization and the death of the nation state began with that crash. A conspiracy theorist might call something like that manufactured. An occultist might call it preordained.Tomm and I call it the Black Monday Murders.On sale in August.It’s got the words ‘Black,’ ‘Monday,’ and ‘Murder’ in the title. I mean, there are jokes in there, but, you know, I don’t want to imply that it’s secretly ‘The Friday Rainbow Orgies’ or anything. It’s a dark book. But then again, so’s the buying and selling of souls.By the way, The Friday Rainbow Orgies is copyright Jonathan Hickman, 2016.My visual goal with TBMM is to keep the book as grounded as possible. We’re dealing with real places and periods in time, so the more true I can be to the reality of what was or is the more shocking the fantastic elements will appear when they happen.Hickman: Yeah. It’s why Tomm is perfect for this. When the supernatural stuff happens, it just appears in this fully realized place. We all know this is fiction. But if we do it right, it kind of makes sense. Like, I’m confident that cannibalism isn’t actually prevalent in many European banks, but they do absolutely eat people alive.It’s like that.As you know, I’ve done a lot of that kind of stuff in the past, but going forward, and specifically in The Black Monday Murders, the bonus content is getting shifted into overdrive. Each issue will have 10, 20 or even 30 pages of world building content that adds to the story being told.I really want to push on this front. All of it will be part of one homogenous package — everything will be designed to go together.I’ve talked about the concept enough earlier in the interview, so let me just close with this…If you want to see a world class artist absolutely dunk all over a book, then this is the book for you. If you’re interested because you like my writing, well, this is probably the best thing I’ve written in the last several years.We’re both very proud of it and hope you’ll check it out.

Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN