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In 1969, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead teamed up for what was billed as a West Coast sequel to the Woodstock festival which happened four months prior. On Saturday, December 6, those bands (and more) convened at a local speedway in rural California, and they were joined by 300,000 of their fans with high hopes that turned into high stakes and harsh consequences that resulted in four deaths, numerous injuries, and a decades-long vendetta that led to at least one confirmed attempt to murder Mick Jagger decades later.

If Woodstock is the face of the '60s 'free love' hippy era in America, then Altamont is the dark side of it all - and in many ways the end of it all. And now it's the subject of a true crime graphic novel by The Walking Dead artist Charlie Adlard and writer Herik Hanna.

Titled Altamont, this 120-page graphic novel follows a young woman named Jenny and her friends as they travel to the Altamont Free Festival in 1969 to have the time of their lives, only by the end of it trying to make it out of the concert with their lives. Adlard, who has drawn his share of gruesome fiction with a 15-year stint drawing the hit comic-turned-TV series The Walking Dead, wanted to take this on out of a love of the '60s (although he was only 3 when Altamont happened), his passion for music (he's a drummer), and to once again go into the dark side of humanity.

"I just remember for ages that I wanted to do a music-based comic. I always wanted to do something about the end of the '60s," Adlard tells Comixtrip. "That was an interesting thing to do something at the end of the sixties, how the hippy ideals were perverted. How it became the paranoid '70s. At the end of the sixties were Altamont and Manson‘s murders."

Adlard says the Manson murders were "too famous" to be something he wanted to delve into, but the concert at Altamont was lesser known and more intriguing.

"When I mention Altamont to a person on the street, people don’t know about it, except if they are big music fans. They know about Woodstock, but it’s not the same," Adlard continues. "I didn’t want to make a comic book version of something or to adapt something else. It would not be better than the documentary [Gimme Shelter]. I wanted to make a story about the darkness of Altamont."

Adlard and Hanna's Altamont debuted as a French-language graphic novel in 2023 with Glénat, and now he reunites with his The Walking Dead publisher Image Comics for its English-language debut this fall.

Altamont Vol. 1 goes on sale August 20.

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.