Dragon Age: Blue Wraith, the newest Dark Horse comic adaptation of popular video game franchise Dragon Age, is being written by New York Film Academy Los Angeles (NYFA-LA) Chair of Screenwriting Nunzio DeFilippis and NYFA-LA Screenwriting instructor Christina Weir.
In addition to teaching at NYFA’s Burbank-based Screenwriting school, DeFilippis and Weir are married and have been writing partners for several years, working together on numerous projects like HBO’s Arli$$ and Disney Channel’s Kim Possible, as well as developing a video game at Sony and a TV movie at Oxygen.
DeFilippis and Weir have been writing comic books for over 17 years, including New X-Men, Adventures of Superman, and Batman Confidential. They’ve created the comic franchises Bad Medicine (in development at Closed On Mondays with NBC), The Amy Devlin Mysteries (in development as a TV series at E!), and Frenemy of the State (co-created with Rashida Jones, optioned as a feature film by Imagine Entertainment/
Universal Pictures).
Blue Wraith is their latest comic in the world of Dragon Age; DeFilippis and Weir previously wrote Dragon Age: Knight Errant in 2017 and Dragon Age: Deception in 2018, both critically acclaimed series published by Dark Horse. Blue Wraith will feature Fenris, a fan-favorite character from Dragon Age II, the blockbuster video game released in 2011. The plot of their newest series has been described as: “Dragon Age: Blue Wraith starts off with the fanatical Qunari seeking to topple the Tevinter mageocracy. Caught in the middle, one powerful young mage’s desperate search for her father brings her face-to-face with a notorious mage hunter—Fenris, the Blue Wraith.”
DeFilippis and Weir are joined by artist Fernando Heinz Furukawa and colorist Michael Atiyeh to being this latest series to life, with covers done by Sachin Teng. The writers also had to work closely with BioWare, the company that produces the Dragon Age franchise, to make sure the comics didn’t conflict with the video game world.
“They are great collaborators,” Weir said about BioWare in an interview with ComicBook.com. “We have story conferences with them before starting a miniseries, and then they give notes along the way. Their notes are always driven by the same instincts we have: what’s the best story? How do [you] let this character grow or shine?”
In the interview, DeFilippis talks about what set writing Blue Wraith apart from writing previous Dragon Age series: “We’re also painting on a bigger canvas than just the individual miniseries issue count. Knight Errant was very much a new thing, but it picked up characters from Magekiller. And from there, we’ve been telling one long quest—Knight Errant into Deception into Blue Wraith and beyond.”
Dragon Age: Blue Wraith #1 is set to release on January 15, 2020 with the following two issues releasing after that. New York Film Academy congratulates NYFA-LA Screenwriting Chair Nunzio DeFilippis and NYFA-LA Screenwriting instructor Christina Weir on their work and encourages everyone to check out the comics when they’re published!