Shark Week Comes to Comics in Discovery Channel’s ‘Top 10 Deadliest Sharks’

If you've been waiting for the sea's most vicious killers to get made-over with short skirts, knee-high socks, high-heels and pigtails... well, you can keep waiting, because that is not what Zenescope Entertainment and Discovery Channel have in mind for their Top 10 Deadliest Sharks comic book. On sale in December and produced by the publisher's all-ages Silver Dragon Books imprint, the shark title will be the first in a series of Discovery Channel comics aimed at readers nine and above.Interestingly, Silver Dragon's Discovery Channel comics won't be "educational" texts as such, but rather fictional narratives that integrate the sort of information you would expect to find on the network's programming. On-air personalities will also be involved with the comics, like Shark Week host Andy Dehart, who will appear in Top 10 Deadliest Sharks.

The initiative came about when Zenescope co-founder Joe Brusha, who is writing the Sharks book, noticed a lack of such material at least year's Book Expo America. He told USA Today, "I was looking around and saw there weren't a huge variety of education and entertainment books with big brands attached to them. I thought there was a great area there that we could develop with Discovery. We reached out to them and they loved the idea."

For its part, Discovery said that this expansion into fiction may not remain in solely the print realm. "We want to do the print portion of this as best we can," said Elizabeth Bakacs, Discovery Channel's vice president of commerce and licensing. "We first want to maximize what we can do within print and then will look at other potential ways that we might reach a larger audience."

Top 10 Deadliest Sharks goes on sale December 1 in comics stores and online, and in major book chains a week later.