Posted in: Comics, Image | Tagged: FOC, image comics, nocterra, scott snyder, tony s daniel. nocterra

Scott Snyder, Tony Daniels' Nocterra, Illuminating Our Own Dark Times

Tonight, Nocterra, the new comic book series by Scott Snyder, Tony S Daniel and Tomeu Morey from Image Comics is going to FOC. The last chance for retailers to up their orders, and be sure of getting copies when the first issue is published. And they are so very close to topping 100,000.

I've had a chance to read it, and I love it for many reasons. But the one that sticks out most is how it is a neon-lit shadow of our own world right now. In the afterword, Scott Snyder talks about  Nocterra, as being inspired by both his own and his son's fear of the dark. But the first issues seems to be a flip side of the world we are living through now.

In Nocterra, the great fear is from a deadly condition that you get from being socially distant. When you are all alone in the dark, that is when you change and become your worst self. And it's deadly for those around you.

The world is dark, the lights have gone out, and from that moment if you stay in the dark you turn into a Shade. So everything has to be lit – even though civilisation has fallen.

As opposed to so many of us, locked in our homes, relying on civilisation to pump itself to us, to stream to us, to be delivered to us. Such as comic books like Nocterra. Instead, civilisation has fallen and is surviving in small clumps, clinging together against the dark outside and the dark that could rise and infect from within.

I don't think I'd be down for a parallel analogy to the world around us right now. But something that flips that paradigm is, it seems, just what I wanted to read. It's a fantasy, but one where we all have to huddle and stick together in the light, seems even more fantastical.

Nocterra also presents a world thirteen years into the big change, when everything went dark and the night turned deadly. This is not a world reacting to the change but once that has found ways of dealing with it. Getting along, the day-by-day struggle. While some folk go out and fight the monsters, travel from one place to another with the lights on full blast.

There will be some comparison to later days of The Walking Dead and Crossed +100 in that fashion, but this is also a balls-to-the-wall explosive action-adventure, and Tomeu Morey brings that explosion of light to the party. Which for a comic book all about light fighting the darkness is more important in Nocterra than any other.

And Nocterra FOCs tonight… tell your comic shop owner. Unless you are a comic shop owner – then tell yourself.

NOCTERRA #1
IMAGE COMICS
JAN210016
(W) Scott Snyder (A/CA) Tony S. Daniel, Tomeu Morey
"FULL THROTTLE DARK," Part One-Ten years after the world is plunged into an everlasting night that turns all living creatures into monstrous shades, the only way to survive is to stay close to artificial light. Enter Valentina "Val" Riggs, a skilled ferryman who transports people and goods along deadly unlit roads with her heavily illuminated eighteen wheeler. This March, legendary creators SCOTT SNYDER (Dark Knights: Death Metal, WYTCHES) and TONY S. DANIEL (Batman, Deathstroke) unveil horrors beyond any shade in this extra-sized first issue.In Shops: Mar 03, 2021
SRP: $3.99

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