Late Night with the Devil star David Dastmalchian's Creature Commandos comic will be separate from the animated show and feature Zatanna

DC's Creature Commandos are coming back in a big way this December with the release of a brand new animated series written by James Gunn. The show (which recently debuted its first trailer ) marks the first volley in the new screen DCU. Before that, however, the monster team will be back in a brand new comic book written by Late Night With the Devil star (and Count Crowley creator) David Dastmalchian and drawn by artist Jesús Hervás.

We recently caught up with Dastmalchian to discuss his movie career, but also took the opportunity to find out more about the comic, which the actor describes as, "something I've wanted to do since I was a kid."

A lifelong comics fan, Dastmalchian says that the tone of DC Horror Presents: Creature Commandos is "a pretty serious and dramatic military monster story," inspired by the Weird War Tales comics by J.M. DeMatteis and Pat Broderick. He also went on to reveal that the title will feature a familiar face from the wider DC universe. "Thankfully I have access to these characters I've always wanted to play with and incorporate, and I felt like a really amazing hero to bring into the story would be Zatanna. I'm so excited! The art is so cool!" He also described Jim Lee's variant cover as "the sickest thing I've ever seen!"

Dastmalchian went on to confirm that the series is not a tie-in to the new animated series. Indeed, for a time, he was worried that the existence of the show might lead to the cancellation of his comic. "James is one of my best friends, and when he told me he was doing the animated series, I was pretty certain that my comic would not see the light of day. But he was like, 'No, they can totally exist in separate realms.'"

Creature Commandos isn't the only new comic that Dastmalchian is currently working on. Knights Versus Samurai will be his first title for Image. "People are like, 'Oh, is that based on something?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, knights! And samurai! Two of my favorite things!'" That series will be drawn by Federico Mele, and Dastmalchian describes the new book as being set in "a world of fantasy where dragons and oni and witches and all manner of mythological monsters from Western mythology as well as Japanese mythology are clashing." He added that "we're going to explore how these warrior classes and these different monsters and creatures have been divided by a really cunning elite class, and they start to discover through magic ways of communicating that start to break through the illusion of differences between them, and they start to see what they may have in common."

Knights Versus Samurai #1 is published by Image on September 25, with DC Horror Presents: Creature Commandos #1 hitting stores the following week on October 2.

You can keep up to date with everything DC has in store with our guide to all the upcoming DC movies and shows .