‘The Princess Murders’ Comic Invites You to Be Its Guest

Comic creators Tony Fleecs and Tim Seeley love to tug on, then mess with, your nostalgia.

Fleecs did it ably with Stray Dogs, his serial killer mini-series told from the point of view of canines with art harkening back to the Don Bluth animated movies from the 1980s. Seeley, who separately created the horror homage Hack/Slash, and Fleecs were also behind Local Man, a murder mystery that featured callbacks to the 1990s superheroics and stylings of Image Comics.

The two are now giving a spin on the Disney princess genre and true to their nature, there will be blood.

Mixing fairy tale romance with a Giallo, The Princess Murders from Image centers on two princesses, the fair Princess Lottie and her wicked stepsister Edwige who arrive to the Kingdom of Sardinia in order to compete with other princesses from across the globe for the hand of the handsome Prince Carlo. Backstabbing, both literal and figurative, begins when a black-gloved killer stalks the castle and the sisters have to fight to survive.

But messing with your nostalgia isn’t just stopping with the comic or the themed-covers. No, the duo decided to take it one step further, this time creating a trailer made to look — and sound — like a Disney animated princess movie musical. The trailer is being released Wednesday timed to a New York Comic Con panel with the two creators.

“We wanted Princess Murders to feel as close to those classic animated princess movies as possible. And it’s not just the design and the colors and the characters, there’s also music!” Fleecs wrote in an email.

“There are little original songs and snippets in every issue of The Princess Murders but because comics are words and pictures on paper, you have to imagine what the songs sound like for yourself,” he wrote. “I knew for the trailer we wanted to actually HEAR the song and it had to sound EXACTLY like those classic animated songs.”

Fleecs called a film composer friend, Nima Fakhrara, who arranged the song with the lyrics Fleecs and Seeley wrote. Fakhrara then brought in vocalist Maria Schafer. The result is “Can’t You Feel It.”

“It’s exactly what Tim and I imagined these princesses would sound like… before they get murdered,” he wrote.

Fleecs and Seeley are co-writing and co-drawing Princess Murders, which will be an ongoing series, with the first issue hitting stores Dec. 9. Brian Reber is the colorist.

Check out the trailer, and some of the variant covers, below.