Scott Snyder and Tony S. Daniel’s Nocterra will get a spinoff special just in time for Christmas, as Snyder teams with Denys Cowan and Chris Sotomayor for Nocterra Special: Blacktop Bill.
The one-shot will tell the origin story of the series’ villain, Blacktop Bill.
“We’re so excited to give you this special about Nocterra’s twisted breakout star and big bad, Blacktop Bill,” Snyder said in the press release. “This issue will tell Bill’s secret origin, and we couldn’t have better partners than legend Denys Cowan and Chris Sotomayor! Get ready for some of the most twisted fun yet…”
I spoke with Snyder earlier this year about Nocterra, and we hit on Blacktop Bill’s role in the series. “To me, he’s pure evil,” Snyder said. “He’s like someone who’s born in our time and was evil in our time in a really horrific way on the highways in a truck. And then is given extra power in this world because he’s so willing to be so bad and he loves it. He doesn’t want the sun to come back at all. So he’s just built for the darkness. And I really like him. He’s in all three arcs and his character changes a lot, but not for the better. He only gets meaner and meaner.”
And even though you’ll get to learn his origin, don’t expect to see his face.
“I want to do it so that you never really see his face,” Snyder told me in April. “Like even back when you see him back in the present day. That he’s always hidden. He’s just primal evil. I’ve always been fascinated with that. There are the characters that have zero conscience and how they’re biologically different, like neurologically different. What happened to them? What’s wrong?”
Tony S. Daniel and Marcello Maiolo provide the main cover, seen above, while Cowan and Chris Sotomayor provide a variant:
There’s also a “blackout” variant:
Nocterra Special: Blacktop Bill arrives in stores Dec. 22.