The Pacific Northwest's premiere comic + pop culture show Emerald City Comic Con 2025 has come and gone, but if all you have are memories and regrets we got you covered. From a recap of all the big moments of the show, to VODs of all the panels from the Main Stage powered by Xfinity, and even details on the ECCC 2026 dates so you can do it all over again (or for the the first time).

Sure, the high concept of Tiny Onion’s upcoming serial killer series Exquisite Corpses is a very fun one — 13 of the world’s deadliest killers are set loose in the same small town to fight for supremacy, with the winner being the one that survives in the end — but, creators James Tynion IV and Michael Walsh promise, what makes the series truly special is a special sauce that the series shares with the best work of Stephen King.

“The idea of a serial killer fight-em-up was sort of in the back of my mind for a while. And I didn't really know what it was beyond that,” Tynion said about the series during a Friday evening panel at Emerald City Comic Con 2025.

The key ingredient in bringing the story to life, as it turned out, was co-writer and artist Michael Walsh. “I remember calling [him] up and it's like at that moment, none of the killers were cooked. It was just the high concept, t was just the purest high concept of the thing,” Tynion recalled. “And it's like, do you want to come up with a bunch of killers and build this big project together, as this kind of big jam piece that we could bring in other creators and do a bunch of cool stuff. I think Michael sent me his first sketch of one of the killers within a day.”

Walsh credited Tynion’s concept and their discussions as setting off “explosions of creativity in every little part” of the project, which proved helpful when it came to the first story retreat of a development process that lasted over 18 months — a retreat in which not only was the lore and the killers of the series set in place, but so did the small town of Oak Valley, where the story takes place, and the people who live (and die) in that setting.

“The heart of the book are the civilians,” Walsh pointed out.

“What we wanted to do here, is make sure that the human side of this book was so, so powerful that these larger-than-life killers, they're the color; they were the things that catch your eye on the cover and bring you into the book. But what keeps you reading issue to issue is because you will have your favorite civilians,” Tynion teased. “You will want these people to survive to the end. It's like picking up a Stephen King novel. The hardest thing about reading a Stephen King novel is there's that moment that you forget it's a horror novel and that these characters you've started to love, are the very bad things are going to start happening to them. And I will say, in the comic, bad things start happening pretty quickly.”

“One of the tough things about drawing that first issue was, once you design a character as a comic book artist, they almost become one of your babies,” Walsh added. “You fall in love with them, with all the little lines in their face and the way that they act and their body language and the way that they move. And drawing that first issue, knowing all the awful, horrible things we're going to do to these people, hurt my heart a little bit. But I think that is a good thing because you kind of want that emotion and energy when you're drawing a comic book. You want to care, you want to love the work that you're doing. And I love all these characters, and now we're going to do nasty things to them.”

Stephen King would be proud.

Exquisite Corpse #1 will be released May 2025 from Image Comics, with the first Exquisite Corpses collection due out in October.

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