Browsing the shelves of the friendly local comic store, my eye was caught by the cover of The Terminator Apocalypse (Part 1). I had to look closely on the sleeve’s label to find the name of the comic, as the cover itself was devoid of title text and allowed the amazing artwork by Declan Shalvey to shine.
This art is amazing. It hits all the nostalgic targets for looking like a 1980s or early 1990s comic. The body and muscles are chunky, constructed with the anatomy of an artist that isclearly used to drawing juiced up superheroes. The shading is provided by a combination of thick black areas with some hatching, and some subtle application of highlights. It looks like all the world like classic ink coloring. If the colors were done digitally, they were done by someone with a total understanding of how to mimic classic techniques. I really love this cover.
The premise of the comic has some distance from the cover. While there is indeed a terminator story inside, it takes place in the Vietnam war. The plot, such as it is, is in this opening issue quite thin. A US soldier is in a city in Vietnam that the US is pulling out of, and he goes AWOL to get his hidden treasure (very clumsily foreshadowed to be a secret wife). On the way he encounters a terminator that has come back in time and has found itself embroiled in a fight against the Viet Cong it has stumbled across.
The interior of the comic is drawn by David O’Sullivan. Some of this art is inspired and interesting. The opening page has a backlit terminator with glowing eyes, which might be a reference to a quick but memorable shot from the original movie. (Or maybe glowing eyes just look cool.)
Other art in the book can be passable, but flat.
Sometimes the flat quality wraps back around into looking like inentional stylization, such as the panel below of Viet Cong firing at the terminator, which looks like a medieval tapestry if you squint hard enough.
Overall the story was thin, and the interior art was hit or miss. When it worked it worked, but it was also obvious many of the panels were just moving things along without trying to make each panel or page a masterpiece.
For $6 though, the premise is intriguing enough and the cover art alone was amazing enough to put Terminator comics on my radar for the near future.
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