EVE Online's Comic Book Will Tell Player-Created Stories

I’ve never heard of a “comic book” before, but I can only assume they’re a degenerate art form produced by adolescents. Which makes them pretty exciting, actually. Unfortunately the people who normally come up with the stories for comic books are too rubbish, and so now Dark Horse Comics are making them about things that happened inside a videogame. EVE: True Stories is a new four-part series based on the player-created events inside EVE Online, the vast space-faring MMO about transferring small icons into floating space boxes, but also occasionally piracy and betrayal and enormous space wars.

The first part of the comic will tell the story of the fall of Band of Brothers in 2009, one of EVE Online’s most notorious alliances, of which I was briefly a member. Jim wrote about the backstabby details at the time, under a title that probably should have been the name of this comic series. Daniel Way, author of Wolverine: Oranges, is writing the series, and the first issue is due on February 19th. The series will then run through to April next year, with a hardback hitting on June 4th.

The comic is part of a broader attempt by CCP to gather and tell the stories of the EVE Online universe, which started earlier this year with a website of the same name and the announcement of the EVE Online TV series, which Brendan discovered while wandering around in a sulphur-fuelled bender in the rocky wastes of Iceland.

Normally these cross-promotional brand-extension books-of-the-movie-of-the-game tie-ins are total bunk, and things you leave lying around your home so you have something with which to wipe up spilled drinks. CCP’s commitment to telling the stories players have created inside the game makes this more interesting, though not as interesting as EVE: Valkyrie, which I have played twice and is all I ever think about.