Image Comics to release Lost Fantasy from Youth writer Curt Pires!
31st January 2025
Article by Paul Dunne
For a lot of you, it seems, the Final Fantasy game series was a seminal work. Not for me of course. I was too busy reading Judge Dredd, and DC Comics to bother with video games.
I’m joking of course. I’m just a person that really, really doesn’t understand video games. But there’s plenty out there that have a far better grasp, including the writer Curt Pires and artist Luca Casalanguida - Which is lucky for us all because it’s led them to create Lost Fantasy, a new ongoing Image Comics series which launches in April!
Pires has created serious, modern classics that chronicle disaffected teenage angst and the difficult times of younger twenty-somethings, most notably in Youth (which you can learn about here) and Indigo Children. Together, Pires and Casalanguida created Money.
Lost Fantasy takes place in an alternate history, one where magic, myth and monsters are just beneath the surface of our own existence. And now, it’s threatening to break through…
With a natural disaster causing a ‘first contact’ between our world and the monster’s domain one hundred years before the story begins, a schism has allowed creatures to break through. Since that schism opened, a secret society of monster-slayers, known as The Great Hunters have formed alliances with world leaders to police the border and keep our world safe…
But last night, something arrived on our side of the border, resulting in a mass killing in Montana, causing things to shift in a way that will ripple through both worlds. And now rookie monster hunter Henry Blackheart must stop it!
Pires is thrilled to be at Image to create this book, but it’s just the beginning of bigger things for the writer: “I’m so excited to be back at Image Comics with Lost Fantasy, the first title in a brand-new slate of best-in-class comics and graphic novels that I’m bringing to the pioneering publisher and home of creator-owned comics. Lost Fantasy has it all: page-turning mystery and pulse-pounding action in equal measure. And I can’t wait for readers to discover it this April!”
Pires also discussed the influences on Lost Fantasy with IGN recently: “Lost Fantasy is a series that merges my love of Western comics like East Of West and Something Is Killing The Children with the dense world-building and action of the JRPGs I grew up playing. Games like the Final Fantasy series—with our lead character's Snow White spikey hair and Giant Sword being a direct homage to Tetsuya Nomura's amazing character design for Cloud."
Pires also teases a layered meaning in the comic’s title: "The 'Lost' in the title is also a homage—albeit a more subtle one—to the great Hironobu Sakaguchi's Lost Odyssey—which is his criminally underrated post-Final Fantasy masterpiece at Mistwalker. So the comic has a lot of JRPG love at its core."
The giant-sized issues of Lost Fantasy will pay homage to Final Fantasy, and each of those issues will also contain a serialised backup story, Indigo Children: Exodus, which continues the story of Indigo Children.
Lost Fantasy #1 will be available at comic book shops on Wednesday, 30th April.
