Dark Horse's Lara Croft and the Frozen Omen will take readers back to classic Tomb Raider

As engaging as it is to follow the story of a young, untested Lara Croft, there are plenty of folks out there who mourn the loss of the eminently confident version of the character from before her 2013 reboot. And those folks are about to get one more way to enjoy the adventures of the classic Lara, in Lara Croft and the Frozen Omen from Dark Horse Comics.

Set in the universe of Crystal Dynamics' Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Frozen Omen is a race against time, as Lara again teams up with Carter Bell and attempts to uncover and secure a series of ancient ivory artifacts before a doomsday cult can use them for nefarious, destruction-related purposes. The five issue miniseries will be drawn by Randy Green, veteran of Top Cow's Tomb Raider comics, and written by Corinna Bechko, no stranger to licensed comics herself.

Bechko wasn't always a comics writer with titles like Star Wars: Legacy and Planet of the Apes under her belt. She's been a veterinarian tech and a zookeeper, and before she settled in the biological sciences she was a student of anthropology with an interest in archeology. Lara Croft's own status as a scientist/academic in addition to being an adventurer is something that Bechko admits drew her to the character when she played the games. We caught up with the writer to find out what's in store for Lara in Frozen Omen.

Above: the cover of Lara Croft and the Frozen Omen #1, by Jean-Sébastien Rossbach.

"Lara is incredibly fun to write," says Bechko. "She doesn’t suffer fools, she’s smart, and she’s talented. She’s always ready for action, but she’s not afraid to think through a problem either. And she doesn’t ever wait around for someone else to save her. There’s a lot of satisfaction in writing a character like that."

Working with a pre-reboot Lara also gives Bechko more room to play with the wild and supernatural. She told Polygon that she'll definitely be indulging in her love of creatures, monsters and horror stories. For example, each one of the seven ancient ivory MacGuffins at the center of the story dates back to the last Ice Age, but comes from no known animal species, living or extinct. And the animals they come from may not exactly be dead.

"I always like my characters to exist in a world that isn’t just composed of humans," she says. "In Lara’s last outing she went up against some pretty impressive characters, so seeing that sort of thing doesn’t throw her. As a writer, I don’t have to spend a lot of space getting her to the point of accepting these things, and can instead concentrate on how she will deal with them. And that’s the fun part! This time around she’ll have to contend with some rather elemental (sometimes literally) monsters as well as the more common bipedal variety."

Lara Croft and the Frozen Omen #1 will hit store shelves and Dark Horse digital on Oct. 7. Maybe we'll see more details on the series while we're wandering around San Diego Comic Con next week?