Aria Preview #1

Trivia · 7 facts

• Published November 1998 by Image Comics through the Avalon Studios imprint, two months before the ongoing series launched in January 1999.
• Written by Brian Holguin with art, cover, and inks by Jay Anacleto; colors by Brian Haberlin and Alex Posada; letters by John Roshell and Liz Agraphiotis.
• Brian Haberlin is credited as co-creator of the Aria property; he co-founded Avalon Studios with Whilce Portacio in 1998, the same year this Preview was released.
• The issue is predominantly black-and-white and functions as a character-introduction sampler, offering readers a first look at the cast set to populate the Aria universe.
• The Preview is the earliest published appearance of Kildare — a 900-year-old faerie princess living incognito in the modern world — along with companion characters Pug, Ondine, Dion (the Greek god Dionysus), Childe Roland, and Gwynnion ('Mad Ginny'), among others.
• The Aria metaseries that followed spanned multiple miniseries from 1999 to 2003, including a crossover with Todd McFarlane's Angela character and the six-issue The Soul Market arc, all collected in trade paperbacks; an Aria Omnibus was later crowdfunded via Kickstarter.
• The Dark One — the series' primary supernatural antagonist, a malevolent ancient entity capable of manipulating historical catastrophes — and his offspring Count Iblis are among the villains introduced to readers through the Preview's character profiles.

Cast · 12 characters

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