Announced at the NYCC 2023 convention in October, Marvel’s next major crossover event Blood Hunt will be with us next Spring and it will see Marvel’s vampires take centre stage.
The main event series will be brought to life by current Avengers writer Jed MacKay and acclaimed X-Men artists Pepe Larraz and Marte Gracia.
And as if that all didn’t sound amazing enough, it has the backing of Marvel Comic’s Editor-in-Chief C. B. Cebulski who we sat down with recently at the Lucca Comics & Games festival. When asked what he’s most excited about coming out? You guessed it…
“The thing I’m most excited about is this Blood Hunt event we have coming up next year,” he says. “We saw the pieces coming together about a year ago with what Jed MacKay was doing in Moon Knight, and then what he started doing with Avengers, it really came to play.
“[Also] with what Bryan Edward Hill was doing in Blade and what was going on in Black Panther – they’re all these threads and we were like: ‘Wait, all this stuff has got to be somehow connected’. The Blood Hunt event was born naturally out of that through our writers, which I always appreciate,” he said.
As you can see from the official trailer, Blood Hunt will feature classic Marvel characters like Vision, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor, Captain America, Blade, and Scarlet Witch.
Marvel has said that Blood Hunt will spill out into a host of tie-in issues in Marvel’s hottest current series and see the launch of all-new limited series, one-shots, and redefining status quos, and Cebulski tells us that fans are going to really appreciate the interwoven storylines that will come together in the blood-soaked crossover event.
“This one is one of the first [events] in a long time where I think people are going to read it and go ‘holy cow! Wait, I remember this character showing up in that book a year ago and oh my God, it is all connected…’ That’s something that I love.”
Brimming with unsurmountable stakes, Marvel has said the saga will drag the reader’s world into darkness as their favorite heroes struggle to ward off the vampire race’s cursed crusade of terror.
So, unsurprising, don’t expect it to be a straightforward reading experience.
“I love when you’re watching a show – and I just met Urasawa Naoki, the great [Manga artist] of the 21st Century – and he always amazed me because you would finish one volume and then you would go to the next one and it’d start on a completely different tangent! Then later everything would come to pass. That’s kind of what we’ve been building, knowingly and unknowingly, for Blood Hunt,” says Cebulski. “I think that’s what’s going to make it truly special.
“People [will] start reading and go ‘oh my god, I gotta go back and read all this stuff’. You can read it fresh and understand it of course, but for the Marvel fans, with the easter eggs and the continuity, it’s going to be something special.”
Blood Hunt will be released in Spring 2024. Main image artwork by Leinil Francis Yu and Sunny Gho.