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Colbert’s comics coming soon

Entertainment Weekly is giving the world a sneak peek at Stephen Colbert’s new comic book series, entitled Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen. The five-issue series features art by Scott Chantler, of Northwest Passage fame, and follows the intergalactic adventures of Jansen, the hero of a sci-fi novel that Colbert’s Comedy Central host character claims to have written. The title is a nod to William Shatner’s TekWar series.

Jansen periodically pops up on The Colbert Report in animated shorts, spouting that distinctive Colbert-ian blind arrogance (“he’s obviously had hundreds of girlfriends” is a recurring Jansen descriptor), and now he’ll start taking over comic book stores as of July 11. Scarface: Scarred for Life’s John Layman, one of the writers of the series’ main storyline, said it was hard to nail down the character: at first “we wrote it as if it was Stephen Colbert in space, so he had a robot eagle sidekick and he was going after alien bears,” he said, but eventually they got it right, giving Jansen a robotic monkey sidekick – and a series-closing nude scene!

The EW article includes a short Jansen strip for an immediate fix. Colbert’s own book, I Am America and So Can You, will be published by Grand Central and distributed in Canada by H.B. Fenn and Company in October.