Salem (comics)

Salem
	Elias Hooke holding his sickle in front of his face, with the Queen of Thorns visible in its reflection. Cover of issue 3.
Publication information
Publisher	Boom! Studios
Schedule	Monthly
Format	Limited series
Publication date	May – October 2008
No. of issues	4 + #0 (January 2008)
Main character(s)	Elias Hooke
Creative team
Created by	Chris Morgan; Kevin W. Walsh; Mike Hawthorne
Written by	Chris Morgan; Kevin W. Walsh
Artist(s)	Wilfredo Torres
Letterer(s)	Marshall Dillon
Colorist(s)	Andrew Dalhouse
Editor(s)	Mark Waid
Collected editions
Salem	ISBN 1-934506-46-X

Salem (long title: Salem: Queen of Thorns) is a 4-issue American comic book limited series published by Boom! Studios and written by Chris Morgan and Kevin W. Walsh.

Publication history

A short issue zero in black-and-white was released for San Diego Comic Con in 2006 by Conspiracy Factory, with art by Mike Hawthorne. In 2007 the story was picked up by Boom! and an extended issue zero was released, this time with art by Wilfredo Torres. The story went on for four more issues. It was collected in 2009.

Plot synopsis

The story centers around Elias Hooke, a former inquisitor for the Puritan Church in colonial Salem. He retired from clerical service after discovering that his participation in the Salem Witch Trials had resulted in the executions of only innocent people, while true evil lurked not in people, but as manifestations of nature. He encounters the Queen of Thorns, a demon witch that takes the form of a gnarled, splintering dead tree.

After the Queen kills his family, he leaves the Church in disillusionment, and begins a crusade to fight the true "witchcraft" in Salem, the Queen and other true "witches" of her ilk. His weapon of choice is a sickle, which he holds in his hand such that it appears much like a prosthetic hook. After saving an accused (and self-admitted) witch, Hannah, she, he and young priest struggling with his faith find themselves running from both the Church, who wants Hooke killed for his apostasy and Hannah for her witchcraft, and the Queen, for whom Hooke is her largest threat.

Collected editions

The series was collected into a trade paperback:

Salem: Queen of Thorns (February 2009, ISBN 1-934506-46-X)

gollark: Although I suppose that *someone* probably keeps the originals around in case they have to change the hashing algorithm.

gollark: It's trickier on images (see how PyroBot does it...) but not impossible. (since you want moderately fuzzy matching, unlike SHA256 and such, which will produce an entirely different hash if a single bit is flipped)

gollark: Through the magic of cryptography, you can condense arbitrarily big files down to a fixed-length fingerprint and check if that matches, with basically-zero false positive risk.

gollark: Hashes of it.

gollark: No, lots of things seem very possible before that.

References

Salem: Queen of Thorns at the Grand Comics Database
Salem: Queen of Thorns at the Comic Book DB (archived from the original)

External links

Salem comic at MySpace

Interviews

Tramountanas, George (12 October 2007). "The Wicked Witch Returns in Boom!'s "Salem"". Comic Book Resources.
Tramountanas, George (18 July 2006). "Meet the Wickedest Witch of all in "Salem"". Comic Book Resources.
Blieck, Augie (1 February 2008). "The Commentary Track: "Salem: Queen of Thorns" #0". Comic Book Resources.

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