On the second day of the 2013 New York Comic Con independent comic book publisher, ComixTribe, announced Wailing Blade: Headtaker, the second of four new titles to be released in 2014 revealed at the convention.

Wailing Blade: Headtaker, a new mini-series written by Richard Douek and lushly illustrated by Charlie Cody, will explore earth’s distant future in which the shattered remnants of an empire that once spanned galaxies lurch their way toward civilization once more. In this strange new world of lost technology, strange creatures and desperate men, the one constant is death. In the shadow of the the great city of Mintum, death has a face, and he has a blade.

Wailing Blade is the story of the Headtaker, a merciless executioner in the employ of the Tyrant of Mintum. With the capture of Autroch, a rebel and bandit lord, one stroke of the Headtaker’s sword will cement the Tyrant’s rule over the entire region. All it will take is a short journey to the border town of Ordz to carry out Autroch’s sentence, but a lot can happen on the road.

Douek explains, “Wailing Blade takes place in the far, far future, where civilization has risen and fallen a hundred times over. What little technology that survived the millennia is very rare, even less understood. The executioner’s mask and weapon are artifacts of an earlier time, when man had greater mastery over technology. There are few who understand its true purpose, least of all our hero, Tychon.”

Lending his talent to the series is artist Charlie Cody. Cody is excited about the project, “I feel like a kid in a candy store,” he said, “the Wailing Blade mythology is certifiably BADASS!”

For Douek, writing this series is a chance to pay tribute to one of his heroes, and create something new for the comic book audience. “I’ve been a huge Jack Vance fan since I first read his Dying Earth stories in high school. When I heard of his passing, earlier this year, I wanted to create something of an homage to him, and the enjoyment his stories have brought me over the years. It’s my sincere hope that people will enjoy the story, and are motivated to check out some of the stories that inspired it – Jack Vance was one of the great writers of science fiction, and his work deserves to be read widely,” Douek said about the inspiration for Wailing Blade.

Douek says that he first conceptualized this new imagining of earth, which lead naturally to the story of Wailing Blade. “I looked at Dying Earth as a source of inspiration, a future Earth so far-flung, so far removed from the present, that it seems like an alien world itself. I thought about what kind of people and societies might populate this strange place, and built the story up from there,” he said.

Wailing Blade: Headtaker will be a new mini-series debuting in 2014.