SDCC | Dynamite announces the creative team for their ‘Terminator’ comic

Dynamite has announced a creative team and a release date for their Terminator comic. Writer Declan Shalvey and artist Luke Sparrow will team up to tell stories that spin out of the plot for the original film but take things in a new direction, with “mostly done-in-one” stories involving killer robots and time travel.

“The approach of this series is new situations, new dilemmas in each issue. Mostly done-in-one stories, but as the series progresses there may be some recognizable faces…” Shalvey said. “We’re going for a more stripped-down, pulpy approach to the book. As innovative and groundbreaking as the first film was, it was also grounded in its environment, being noirish and moody as hell. An unstoppable force is coming to kill you — that’s the element of the franchise I want to lean into.”

Here’s how Dynamite describes the series:

The plans to kill Sarah Connor and her son John have failed, but that isn’t going to stop the genocidal Skynet. If at first it doesn’t succeed, it’s going to expand the theater of operations. There are still a few more avenues into the past to try that will allow it to eliminate the human resistance before it even starts. Skynet and its Terminators are determined to stamp out these pivotal figures in history before they lead to their processors being smashed into silicon shrapnel.

This new front in the time war comes with Terminators dispatched all across the globe and throughout time to target not only current resistance fighters but also their ancestors, as well as any unlucky souls caught in the crossfire. Though at first it may not seem that this wide range of secondary objectives are as straightforward or critical as the original missions of the T-800 and T-1000, the sheer scope of this new warfare defies that. Time is literally on Skynet’s side — when all of history becomes a war zone, suddenly nowhere — and no-when is safe!

Dynamite announced earlier this year that they had acquired the license to make comics based on the movie franchise, which kicked off with The Terminator in 1984 and has since spawned several sequels, a TV show, video games and several comic series at various publishers — many of which were collected by Dynamite as part of their very successful crowdfunding campaign.

This isn’t Shalvey and Sparrow’s first project together, as they previously teamed on Old Dog: Operations, a spinoff from Shalvey’s Old Dog series. Here’s a look at some of Sparrow’s interior artwork for the first issue:

While he isn’t doing interior artwork, Shalvey did draw the main cover, shown above. The first issue will also come with several variants by Edwin Galmon, Joshua “Sway” Swaby and David Cousens, as well as an”icon cover” by Alex Ross from earlier in his career for the “Burning Earth” storyline:

The first issue will arrive in stores this October.