Iron Maiden and the publisher Z2 will mark forty years of Somewhere In Time with a graphic anthology, out worldwide on 2 March 2027.
Each of the eight songs gets a story, which for this record is a more obvious idea than it sounds. Somewhere In Time was the album where the band gave the sleeve a world rather than a picture: a city at night, stuffed with jokes and references, built by Derek Riggs out of the songs. Turning it back into narrative is reading the cover the way people have been reading it since 1986.
The framing is where the real curiosity sits. Kelly Sue DeConnick writes a prologue and an epilogue, drawn by Andy MacDonald, about what happened in the minutes before the moment the cover freezes. DeConnick is a serious name to hand this to, and the brief is the one every fan of that sleeve has imagined.
Z2 have worked with the band before. Four decades on, the record is being sold as fiction rather than as music, which says something about where its reputation finally landed.