In the fall and rebirth of CrossGen, a lot of peripheral books got lost. MVCreations took their Masters of the Universe and Don Bluth books away, Team Red Star left early, and even Brian Pulido seems to have gone to play in other fields, launching a new line of Chaos!-like books at Avatar Press.

Lost in that shuffle was a book that has a higher profile, and deserves life, Hurricane Entertainment's John Carpenter's Snake Plissken Chronicles. The studio did a great job with the first two issues, meeting with great fan reaction, and now it looks like they, too, have left CrossGen. (And it must be on good terms, because Bill Rosemann at CrossGen tipped us off to this new information.)

If you haven't yet picked up this book, you should. Writer William O'Neill duplicates the feel of Snake Plissken's movie world without slavishly copying it. And Tone Rodriguez does gritty work on the art -- and that's a good thing.

Topping it all off? One heck of a great guest cover artist for the fourth issue -- and Hurricane has sent out jpegs of all the covers for the third and fourth issues (alternate covers -- and all are good).

From Hurricane Entertainment:

Taking on full publishing responsibilities of their critically-acclaimed action series, Hurricane Entertainment announces the upcoming release of issues 3 and 4 of JOHN CARPENTER'S SNAKE PLISSKEN CHRONICLES.

Jan Utstein-O'Neill, Publisher for Hurricane Entertainment said, "Rumors of Snake's death are greatly exaggerated. Here's a perfect example of life imitating art. As any Snake fan knows Mr. Plissken is not dead."

The entire series will ship exactly as solicited at 32 pages, $2.99 each, written by William O'Neill, penciled by Tone Rodriguez and colored by Chris Blythe. All previous orders through Diamond will be fulfilled.

"It was a dream to bring John Carpenter's vision to comics and I'm proud to say this story arc will be completed as originally intended. Same creators, same printer, same paper and even more thrills," said O'Neill.

Rodriguez added, "My dream was to have an original Michael Golden masterpiece grace our fourth cover. Wait till you see this beauty. Pencils, inks and colors by Golden. It's just awesome. Even Snake film Producer Debra Hill was blown away."

SNAKE PLISSKEN CHRONICLES #3 (Diamond Comic Distributors item codes: AUG032130 and AUG032131) is at Quebecor Printing right now and will ship at the end of this month. Issue #4 (Diamond Comic Distributors item codes: OCT032293 and OCT032294) is penciled and entering the final phases of production. As for future story arcs, Hurricane is currently speaking with several publishers.

"We thank our friends at CrossGen for helping us launch this series," stated Utstein-O'Neill. "We've believed in this book from the very beginning and I'm proud to say we deliberately over-printed the first two issues so that every fan could jump aboard at any time."

"While it's been a challenging Autumn, it was also great to hear from so many people interested in Snake's future. The best way to help is to ask your local comic shop to restock SNAKE PLISSKEN issues #1 and #2 so that issue #3 can be received by its widest audience yet," said Utstein-O'Neill.

Derek McCaw