Dark Horse Comics announced on Wednesday that Mike Russell‘s hilarious web comics The Sabretooth Vampire lurks its way into the pages of Dark Horse Presents in the next few months with issues #12 and #14.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of The Sabretooth Vampire, it’s pretty simple, actually. The Sabretooth Vampire is about a vampire who has the teeth of a sabertooth tiger. The vampire is a little on the short side, so these massive teeth tend to get in the way of his nefarious deeds that usually involved using the teeth to suck blood from innocent (or guilty, for that matter) victims. So, it’s a bit of a recurring gag, but people watched Looney Toons for years, so deal with it. Anyway, it’s cute, fun and gives you a nice chuckle when you read the strips, so I’m really excited about this.

Now, we’ve been over the fact that there are tons of awesome web comics out there, and Dark Horse has been great about collecting the material into trades to release them in a print format to the massives, which they’ve done before with The Sabretooth Vampire, but this is a little different. Printed in these two issues will be brand new material from the strip, and really, it’s the perfect transition for a web comic to printed pages. Which is something I’m really liking about Dark Horse Presents recently. A lot of the draw to Dark Horse Presents it the serialized strips that make up an issue like Hellboy, B.P.R.D. or Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson’s The Massive, but what I like about it is when they include traditional comic strips like Sabretooth Vampire, or the upcoming House of Fun and Milk and Cheese strips from Evan Dorkin. The latter comics work better for me in an anthology format because it doesn’t really break up a story like you do when you basically take a single issue comic and split into three or four small segments spanned across multiple issues and months.

But I digress. Adding web comics to an anthology comics like Dark Horse Presents adds a nice ‘zine feel from the early to mid-’90s, which makes sense because web comics are exactly like that. The web comic market is a group of writers, artists and cartoonists that do things on their own terms, so it’s great to see this kind of exposure for lesser known web comics in a book right next to the likes of Hellboy and creators like Mike Mignola and Brian Wood. I’ve got to give all kinds of respect to Dark Horse for sharing the spotlight here.

You can find The Sabretooth Vampire in Dark Horse Presents #12 and #14 which will be available in stores and online on May 28 and July 18, respectively. Make sure to pick them up and support this great initiative from Dark Horse, and to check out more from Sabretooth Vampire, check out the website.