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With IT: Welcome to Derry currently airing on HBO Max, your pals at Popverse have been spending a lot of time talking about the shared universe between the characters of Stephen King's many novels. And while we knew that that universe showed no signs of shrinking, we'll have to admit we didn't expect to see more of it coming from one of our favorite comic writers: Benjamin Percy.

See, Percy is working with Stephen King himself on an experimental novel The End Times, which exists as a series of newspaper articles, and during a recent conversation with Popverse's own Ashley V. Robinson, Percy revealed that the story exists somewhere in the sprawling multiverse King created. Check out this video for his revelation:

Wild, no? Just imagine being Benjamin Percy and finding out you were contributing to the same universe as The Dark Tower and IT! But if you're not as die-hard a King fan as we presume Percy to be, his explanation above may confuse you a bit. In that case, allow us to explain.

In the 1980s, Stephen King decided to write under a pen name in order to see if people would still read his fiction without his (already widespread) name recognition. The pen name he chose was Richard Bachman, and with the fake name, King created a fake life for the fake author, in which Richard was married to a woman named Claudia y Inez Bachman. Later, in King's Dark Tower series (which he wrote under his real name), King revisited the character of Claudia, making her the author of the in-universe children's book Charlie the Choo-Choo.

Fast-forward a couple decades, and King is revisiting Claudia again, choosing to contribute his portions of The End Times under her name. Not only does this expand the King-verse as we know it, but it also means that The End Times is somehow canon to the same multiverse as Pennywise and the Overlook Hotel, albeit in a roundabout (and likely not entirely thought-out) way.

Now our only question is - how is Ben Percy going to sneak Wolverine into the King-verse?

Bad Hand Books will publish The End Times as a series of tabloid newspapers starting November 2026. You can subscribe to the publication here. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A genre fiction literary column called If It Bleeds, We Read

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.