Dynamite has announced The Terminator: Valentine’s Day Special 2027, which as its name suggests, is a romantic Terminator one-shot releasing to coincide with Valentine’s Day next year. Written by Dan Watters (Batman: Dark Patterns), with art by Pasquale Qualano (Vampirella), the comic is set in the run-up to February 14, 1987, and follows Jill, a Cyberdyne employee, who becomes concerned with how distant her boyfriend Jack has become.
The synopsis says, “The answer [to why] is that Jack has become single-mindedly obsessed with work. He’s locked in on the upcoming project they’ve both been working on, the background track to their passionate entanglement. Their employer Cyberdyne, the Cyber Dynamics Systems Corporation, has a major product launch — literally — around the corner. Their first surveillance satellite is scheduled to lift off February 14, 1987! Can love survive at the genesis of Skynet, before the rise of the machines, and as the terrifying Terminators loom in the future? Find out in this new 30-page story landing in everyone’s reading pile ahead of Valentine’s Day.”
The premise might seem tangential, but lest we forget, the original 1984 Terminator movie itself revolved around the paradoxical romance between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, that led to the birth of humanity’s savior John Connor. This will mark Watters’s first solo writing project at Dynamite, with his previous book there, The Shadow: Leviathan (2017-2018), having been co-written by Si Spurrier, and Qualano’s first Terminator comic.
The book will be released in February with covers by Björn Barends, Francesco Mattina, and Stuart Sayger. In the meantime, the first issue of Dynamite’s latest Terminator series, Archie vs. the Terminator, is available now. Watters‘s relaunch of Spider-Woman will also begin on November 4.
