NEW: Guide to Stranger Things Comics & Novels

It’s another slightly scary new guide for Patrons of CK. This one is for something I love outside of comics – so much that I’ve actually written a few blog posts about it! I’ve also kept up with its comics for years, and when I searched the web for a complete guide I came up with nothing. Nada. Zero. Even the supposed main Wiki is missing tons of information and guidance. Well, we all know what happens next – I make a new guide! No guide on the internet has every put every TV Season, Novel, and Comic Book in order … until now, in my brand new Guide to Stranger Things Comics & Novels!

Guide to Stranger Things Comics & Novels

This guide is available exclusively to Patrons until the debut of Season 5 later this month!

I know what you’re asking yourself: Is Stranger Things really this complicated? Can you just… watch the show and then read the comics?

My friend, I need you to roll for Perception… with disadvantage!

That’s because the comics have never told a story in continuity order. The jump between seasons and tell prequel stories, with occasional one-shots set during seasons and their epilogues. Then, adult novels have added more prequel stories, but YA novels have told stories that overlap seasons – which doesn’t count the junior novelizations of the seasons themselves.

No wonder no other guide has ever gotten this right. Just like Nancy’s relationship with Jonathan and Joyce’s relationship with Hopper, it’s complicated.

Why are these comics and novels so wildly out of order?

It comes down to the release strategy that kicked off the expanded universe of content. It began in the gap between Season 2 and Season 3, which was two years rather than just one. With the show at peak media saturation and time to develop tie-in media, we saw an initial salvo of content launch in 2018.

That included Stranger Things (2018), a comic detailing Will’s side of the Season 1 story in the Upside Down, and Stranger Things: SIX (2019), a comic exploring the back-story of side characters from Season 2. Then, in 2019, it added Supicious Minds, a novel focusing on the history of Dr. Brenner before he founded the lab. Plus, a YA novel exploring Max’s life before she joined the cast.

That all makes sense – filling in prequel stories ahead of a new season.

Then, came the long, long, long wait from Season 3 in 2019 to Season 4 in 2024, in large part due to the pandemic’s effect on TV production. In that gap, the Stranger Things content machine marched on… but, it couldn’t move the story forward from Season 3 because Season 4 was being kept under tight wraps.

Things didn’t spiral out of control all at once in 2020. You can tell from the content earlier in the year that it was still all initial multi-media content planned from the start – YA original graphic novels and Dungeons & Dragons content.

Yet, as things progressed from 2020 into 2021 and beyond, the content machine kept churning out comics and novels – which were still constrained to occur prior to Season 4.

And, it couldn’t all be coordinated where release order equaled reading order. Robin’s sapphic filmmaking adventures fit into a different place than Eddie Munson’s formative years as a metal guitarist. As more character-defining moments were filled in, more stories overlapped in time.

There’s plenty of material on the Stranger Things wiki about the show itself, and many comments on various Reddits trying to place each individual work into the timeline… but nothing that puts them all in one place, in the right order, by someone who opened up every single piece of media to confirm the dates.

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