Billy Tuccišs blockbuster character, Shi, will visit Avatar Press for two mini-series beginning with SHI: POISONED PARADISE. The series will be written by Tucci with J.C. Vaughn (Shi: Akai, McCandless & Company) and illustrated by Avatar's Karl Waller.
Over the past year, Tucci co-wrote and illustrated SHI: AKAI, which introduced one of his new characters, Victoria Cross, and he completed the SHI: YEAR OF THE DRAGON mini-series. He also wrote, produced and directed his first film, Some Trouble of a SeRRious Nature, and produced a comic version of it as well. Additionally he created preview books of several of his other pending projects Shi-GI, The Burning Blue, The Undaunted and Victoria Cross.
"My non-comics work, particularly in film, has made it nearly impossible to develop new properties and continue to work full-time on Shi for the few months. Not doing Shi doesn't seem like much of a solution, so I'm excited to be able to offer new Shi stories while I'm able to work on other projects. I'm also very happy to be working with William Christensen and Avatar on these two new mini-series, "Tucci said. "We've always had a great working relationship and I look forward to it continuing on this new level."
Crusade is planning its own Shi projects as well. This June will see the debut issue of all new monthly series SHI: THE ILLUSTRATED WARRIOR (by Tucci and novelist Craig Shaw Garner) and later this year the mini-series SHI: BIO TERROR (by Tucci & Vaughn) and Shi-GI. Other titles will appear in April with the Victoria Cross 1/2, and August will see the special DVD edition of Some Trouble of a SeRRious Nature along with comics and other film related merchandise.
"I hadn't really planned on doing a press release about any of this, but when Avatar's announcement went out I started getting calls and e-mails thinking Crusade was not going to be publishing any more. I'm glad folks were concerned, but that concern, I'm happy to report, was misplaced," Tucci concluded. "It's going to be a wonderfully busy 2002 now that we've got more books coming out than wešve had in the past 3 years."
