Burnham And Schoening Return For ‘Ghostbusters International’

When IDW's Ghostbusters ongoing series ended, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before the series picked back up in some form, and when Ghostbusters: Get Real launched a few months back as a crossover between the IDW continuity and the Real Ghostbusters animated series, there were a whole lot of hints that it wouldn't be the final act. Today at New York Comic Con, IDW has announced the next form the series will take, and it looks like the Ghostbusters are going worldwide.

When Erik Burnham and Dan Schoening return to the series in 2016, it'll be for Ghostbusters International, a new adventure that finds the team traveling to battle ghosts in other countries under a contract with the UN.

It's an exciting premise, but not an entirely unexpected one. Over the course of the ongoing series, Burnham and Schoening balanced out the stories of the Ghostbusters in New York with a road trip across America that gave a great taste of what you can do by switching up the setting. On top of that, there's been a steady theme of the team itself growing and expanding, from Ron Alexander, the rival-turned-recruit whose knockoff Ghost Smashers gave the team their first bit of competition, to the formation of a secondary team led by Janine, all the way to the idea of keeping the 2009 video game in continuity by having the main character start up a franchise in Chicago.

As Burnham said in an interview at CBR, it's all part of an attempt to bring the franchise closer to the original concept:

We've always intended to use as much of Aykroyd's concepts as we could and the more we used, the more we expanded on the core, the more it naturally allowed us to expand further. We've added team members, investigated other places, brought in new equipment, seen different dimensions, had the team face competition and industrial espionage and opened a new franchise. And for the guys -- and the NYC they live in -- it's all been routine, just as Aykroyd intended. I don't know if we'll ever expand out to his full vision, but there's so much there that just works so well in comics.

Ghostbusters International kicks off from IDW in January of 2016.