At the end of the XX Century 21st Century Games, an Italian company despite its English name, got from Wizards of the Coast a couple of licenses related to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D): one for the famous 'miniature reprints' of TSR products (now a highly sough for collectors' set), both books and boxed sets (!) and another one for AD&D based comic books. Besides these world market products, 21st Century Games has BIG plans for the Italian market and it released a new version of Vampire The Masquerade, a couple of Call of Cthulhu sourcebooks, the Mutant Chronicles miniatures game and more. The Italian language releases too are now very rare and highly sought after (the two CoC sourcebooks for example usually command 100 euros apiece!).
But what is more iinteresting is the comic book series: called Forgotten Realms - The Forbidden Sands of Anauroch, it was planned as a mini series of six issues, albeit just two were published in 2000. They were hardback, 48 pages, full colour books and narrated the adventure(s) of a band of adventurers chasing a sexy and very scheming mage. Starting from the cover, it's easy to notice the very heavy manga influence on the artists due to the fact that mangas were getting very popular in Italy (and not just Italy) at the time.
Albeit the printing is high quality, the drawings are average and the English translation not that good, a fact not lost by many fans at the time. It seems that 21st Century Games went under right in 2000, perhaps 2001,and so the missing four issues were never released. Today, this comic books are something of a curiosity and do not command high prices - many people are not aware of their existence and an Italian edition, albeit planned, never came out. Anyway, 21st Century was a true pioneer, being willing to ask for and getting a license for creating original AD&D content in a country that was not the United States...