Besides being a genuinely nice guy and very approachable, Joe Hill may be one of this busiest comic book/fantasy/horror writers working today. Joe shared his impressive slate of projects at WonderCon yesterday and it looks like I will need to make some more bookshelf space.
After the current arc of Locke and Key: Clockworks, Hill will wrap up the storyline with Omega. The sixth installment of his acclaimed collaboration with Gabriel Rodriguez for IDW Publishing will bring to an end the main storyline running through the title.
It will be followed by various short stories featuring the continuing adventures of the Locke family similar to what Neil Gaiman did throughout his Sandman series with one-offs.
Issue 2 of Road Rage, the first graphic collaboration between Hill and his father Stephen King will be out next week. A preview of the IDW comic book can be viewed HERE.
Hill also revealed that he is working on a follow-up to The Cape titled The Cape: 1969. This four-issue series will debut in July, and go back to Vietnam to tell the story of the Cape before its most recent incarnation.
Hill and Rodriguez then plan to collaborate on a superhero book for either Marvel or DC, followed by a new creator-owned series.
The prolific author continued by discussing his prose work beginning with a short story that will appear in the Ray Bradbury tribute collection “Shadow Show” this summer.
Hill’s next novel will be titled “NOS4A2,” a play on “Nosferatu” that refers to a vanity license plate owned by the story’s villain. Hill described the book as “my senior thesis statement on horror fiction,” about “a bad man with a big car” who kidnaps kids and takes them to a place called Christmas Land (the opposite of Disneyland). Due in April 2013, the novel is “as long as my first two novels put together,” Hill said, and it will feature a five-issue companion comic book series, telling more stories from Christmas Land. The first issue of that series will be drawn by Hill’s “Locke & Key” collaborator Gabriel Rodriguez.
Next will be an untitled short story collection.
Hill said he was already halfway through with his next novel, “The Fireman,” a “smaller book” that he described as a “really cheerful end-of-the-world novel” about “being happy in the face of darkness.” He said he hoped to have it out within a year after the release of “NOS4A2.”
Joe also confirmed that there would be more Gunpowder stories when time permits along with future signed limited editions of Locke & Key published by Subterranean Press. Sub Press will also be publishing the limited edition of NOS4A2.
