Stone Sour singer rocks comics with new Dark Horse book

• Stone Sour singer Corey Taylor's 'House of Gold & Bones' comic coincides with two concept albums
• 'House of Gold & Bones' is a sci-fi/fantasy morality play starring a man called the Human
• Taylor's favorite comic scribes: Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis

Metallica's ...And Justice for All and Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood were seminal "event" albums in the childhood of Corey Taylor that necessitated the future rock star standing in line for hours and then listening for a couple of days straight once he got the record home.

The Stone Sour frontman has set out to find the 21st-century equivalent. For him, it involves comic books.

Taylor is penning House of Gold & Bones, his four-issue Dark Horse Comics miniseries and first comic work debuting April 17, 2013, that will give visual representation to the short story told in two upcoming Stone Sour concept albums. The first, House of Gold & Bones Part 1 (Roadrunner Records), arrives Oct. 22, and Part 2 drops during the spring/summer.

"It's something I've always wanted to do," says Taylor, a hardcore comics fan himself who will be signing at New York City's Javits Center on Saturday during his inaugural trip to New York Comic Con. "I've always been very critical of when comics go south and basically pull the fan out of what the potential is.

"It's me pretty much putting my money where my mouth is."

Taylor is the latest rocker to join the Dark Horse fold: Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello wrote the series Orchild while My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has done two Umbrella Academy miniseries for the publisher. (Way will be at NYCC, too, detailing his upcoming The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys book.)

The sci-fi/fantasy tale at the center of House of Gold & Bones is also a morality play "set in this crazy world where nothing's really what it seems, but at the center of it is really a concept about life and evolution and changes," Taylor says.

The Human is a man who has to figure out what the rest of his life is going to be, allowing himself to change and be the person he's always wanted to be or keep continuing to make the same mistakes, wrong choices and "spinning his wheels in life's mud."

"I wanted people to be able to put themselves in his shoes and be able to relate to it right away," says Taylor, who also is a vocalist for the masked metal band Slipknot. "The Human basically spends most of his time confused or scared or lashing out in a lot of ways."

The other protagonist Peckinpah (inspired by the Western director Sam) is akin to Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars fame: "He's older and he's trying to help the Human while at the same time not doing everything for him," Taylor says.

There is a pair of antagonists, as well. Alan is a ball of anger and sarcastic wit who could blow up at any time, and Black John has a dangerous, off-kilter "God, he's going to destroy us all" vibe.

Some of the central story is from the people around him, but the vast majority is autobiographical for Taylor and about aspects of his own life he's tried to figure out over the past seven years.

"Especially in (the music) industry, you're encouraged to not only appear to be as youthful and arrogant as possible, but you're encouraged to make your own terrible decisions and have this kind of abhorrent behavior. People think that it sells," Taylor explains.

"I figured out a long time ago that that's so boring and so clichéd. To me, it was about shuffling that off and figuring out who do I want to be? Who do I want to try to be? Who do I want to aspire to be?"

Taylor says he's a "voracious" action-figure collector who bags, boards and alphabetizes all his comics "because I'm a nut like that." He'll proudly tell you of the time last year at San Diego Comic-Con where he found a vendor that had both a mint-in-box Alien movie toy from 1980 and a Shogun Warriors Godzilla he'd been hunting forever.

In the early Stone Sour years of the mid-1990s, Taylor fell out of love with comics during a Marvel Comics "Maximum Clonage" story line that starred Spider-Man but burned the musician out with a "whole tired premise," he says.

A couple of years later, Taylor got back into comics when friends at a comic shop turned him on to Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan and especially Garth Ennis' Preacher. "It was so smart, so funny, so intelligent, so unbelievably offensive that I became a fan right away," Taylor says of Ennis' masterwork.

The rocker has found a welcome challenge in scripting comics as well as working off the main story for the concept albums, maneuvering music and lyrics into a place where they drive the narrative.

"The songs and the lyrics are essentially the internal dialogue that's going on with these characters," Taylor says. "Maybe it's not telling a story that's in the story itself, but it's giving a little insight into what that character's thinking in that moment."

In addition, Taylor is planning on adding more multimedia and having a website full of hidden easter eggs such as handwritten lyrics, behind-the-scenes photos and possibly rough drafts of comic art.

It's all a part of his plan to make albums vital again for fans and create a journey that can compare to the days of venturing to the record store, finding the likes of Guns 'N Roses Appetite for Destruction and other favorites, and enveloping himself in the music for days on end.

"This to me is as real as it gets," Taylor says. "I still care about what I do, and if that means going above and beyond, losing sleep, making sure that everything I put out there is bigger and better and way ahead of its time than everybody else, then so be it."