Thieves and Kings
Canadian comic book series by Mark Oakley
Thieves and Kings (stylized as Thieves & Kings) is a Canadian comic book series written, penciled and published independently and irregularly by Mark Oakley.
The first issue was published in September 1994, with the creator planning on publishing a complete saga comprising 100 issues and about 2000 pages. The series is available as individual comic issues and in trade paperback form.
Thieves & Kings is high fantasy set in a land called Oceansend, with most of the story focused in and around the capital city of Highborn. The story follows the life of a young thief named Rubel and a young sorceress named Heath, but features a larger cast of characters.
Thieves & Kings is distinct from most other comics in that the creator makes extensive use of illustrated story pages in addition to the traditional sequential art found in most comics.
Plot
Steve Raiteri gives this summary of the Thieves & Kings story:
" In this thoroughly engrossing self-published black-and-white fantasy saga, a multi-faceted conflict plays out between the evil Lady Locumire, who supports a power-hungry prince in his war of conquest, and a loose group of friends and factions opposing her. Among the cast are 12-year-old Heath Wingwhit, a powerful sorceress living through successive reincarnations, brought 1000 years into her future to learn magic; Rubel, a teenage thief with special abilities and charisma; Soracia, a beautiful 10,000-year-old sorceress attempting to reclaim herself from evil; Princess Katara, Heath’s current incarnation, who’s hatching a still-obscure but ambitious plot with her friends the trolls; and the immortal wizard Quinton Zempfester, who provides hilarious comic relief on-panel but holds great power behind the scenes."
Characters
Rubel (pronounced "rue-bell")
Thieves & Kings' protagonist, Rubel is a combination of hero and everyman. The story opens with Rubel as a boy of 14, (he ages as the story progresses) returning home from an apprenticeship at sea. Rubel was born in the "Sleeping Wood," a magical forest that borders Highborn, and was raised by his grandfather, with additional influence from Quinton the wizard and some local townspeople.
“Thieves and Kings” enters the record as canadian comic book series by Mark Oakley. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thieves, Kings and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7784106. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 2000 and 1000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thieves and Kings” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.