ThunderCats: Cheetara, the Saladin Ahmed and Andrea Arcari Interview

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Cheetara has been a ThunderCat since the first frame of the first episode in 1985, and in forty years she has never carried an ongoing series of her own. That changes on 9 September 2026.

We spent half an hour with writer Saladin Ahmed and artist Andrea Arcari, with questions submitted by the r/ThunderCats community through an AMA. Three things we were curious about, and all three got proper answers.

Is it really a heresy story? Dynamite’s solicitation says Cheetara starts hearing voices that contradict the Book of Omens and praise the Mu’Tants. That points the book straight at the ThunderCats’ own scripture, which is a bolder starting place than a launch issue usually picks.

What does she look like in 2026? She was designed in 1985, and forty years of expectation have collected around her since. Somebody has to make that call on every page, and that somebody is Arcari.

How do the two books talk to each other? Cheetara launches out of the SilverHawks crossover and Greg Pak relaunches the main title the month after. We wanted to know whether you need both.

The creative team

Writer

Saladin Ahmed

Detroit born, Dearborn raised, and a poet and novelist before he was a comics writer. His debut novel Throne of the Crescent Moon was nominated for the Hugo and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. His first comic, Marvel's Black Bolt, won the Eisner.

Since then: The Magnificent Ms. Marvel, Miles Morales: Spider-Man, Daredevil, and currently Wolverine, plus the creator-owned Abbott at BOOM, about a Black woman reporter in 1970s Detroit who sees what nobody else can and is disbelieved for it. Useful preparation, it turns out, for writing a prophetess nobody quite trusts.

Artist

Andrea Arcari

An Italian artist working out of Florence, drawing digitally in Procreate, with a background in character design. He came to ThunderCats through the Dynamite comics, and from there to the 2011 series, which is the version he rates highest on character design. He is candid that he has not watched the original 1985 episodes.

That does not stop him aiming at the 1985 look on the page. He grew up on animation and wants the book to move like a cartoon does: "My aim is to represent at the best, like an episode you can see on TV in the 80s. Because she is the fastest character we have, so we have to give importance to that."

Cheetara, forty years on

We asked Arcari what carries forward from 1985 and what he would leave there.

He is also drawing the fastest character in the franchise, which is one of the harder briefs in comics. His answer was animation: make a static page read like a moving one.

Ahmed is coming at the same problem from the script side, and mentioned that he wrote a Quicksilver miniseries for Marvel in 2018 that remains one of his favourite jobs, because he loves speedsters. Cheetara, he points out, is the closest thing the ThunderCats have to an actual superhero.

The series

This is Cheetara’s third book in three years, after Soo Lee’s five-issue miniseries in 2024 and the Worldbreaker one-shot in 2025, but the first one without an end date attached. Ahmed told us that runway was a large part of why he took the job, in an era when most books with popular leads get five issues to prove themselves.

Editor Nate Cosby brought Arcari onto the book, and Arcari credits him for the opportunity.

Asked for one reason a fan of forty years should pick up issue one, Ahmed did not hedge:

Thanks

To everyone in r/ThunderCats who sent questions through the AMA, and especially to u/TenOunceCan for organising it. Several of the questions here came straight from that thread.