Jeff Lemire’s and Gabriel Walta’s spooky hit series makes its post-hiatus comeback soon!
Article by Paul Dunne
19th January 2025
Phantom Road, which started its engine in 2023 and has been journeying with acclaim is currently on hiatus… but Jeff Lemire and Image Comics have just announced it will be making a comeback in April this year! Written by Lemire and drawn by Gabriel Walta (whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year at Gosh, and who drew The Vision for Tom King and Marvel), Phantom Road is a slice of metaphysical weirdness worthy of peak X-files! If you’ve so far missed it, you’re missing out.
Image describes the book as grindhouse horror meeting high-concept supernatural fantasy, which doesn’t even begin to do it justice. Just take a look at the sample pages from the early issues in this article!
Walta’s excellent, eerie pencils have most recently been seen in issue #4 of Absolute Batman, chronicling this version of the Dark Knight’s origin, no less. Lemire is also about to begin a ‘run’ in DC’s Absolute Universe when his and Nick Robles’ Absolute Flash arrives in March. And if you want to know my picks for February and March’s best comics, you can join my Patreon tier, The ‘Paul’ List, which is my curated, hand-picked batch of comics coming your way for the next few months.
Phantom Road is a mood all its own, moving in a direction about as far away from superhero books as you can get… but still concerned with other worlds and the fate of those other worlds.
It begins when Dom, a long-distance truck driver whose past is shrouded in deeply personal tragedy, meets Birdie, a woman on the road. When he stops one night to assist Birdie, who has been in a massive car crash, they pull an artefact from the wreckage that throws their lives into fifth gear. Suddenly, a typical midnight run has become a frantic journey through a surreal world where Dom and Birdie find themselves the quarry of strange and impossible monsters…
To tell you any more wouldn’t just ruin it, it would imply I really know what’s going on! But Phantom Road’s mystery deepens with every issue. If you want to get on board with it, you can pick up the first two volumes, which collect the first 10 issues of the series, before #11 arrives. You can get a tiny sneak preview of Walta’s inks below for the issue below.
Pre-order Phantom Road #11 from your local comic shop!