The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 1, James Robinson and Others

This book came out at just the right time – I finally watched T3 last year, and found out it wasn’t half as bad as I’d feared, and then this year watched and adored the Terminator tv series, which finished all too soon as a result of the writers’ strike.

Luckily this collection of Terminator comics from the early nineties is available to step into the breach. The weird thing is, almost everything that’s in the tv series turns up in here too, from human hit squads going after Cyberdyne people to cops slowly putting the pieces together to fleshless Terminators wearing motorcycle helmets.

Whether that’s a sign that story options are a bit limited in the Terminator universe, or whether it’s just comics, in their usual way, acting as pathfinders for other media, I don’t know. Either way, I had a terrible night of nightmares after starting to read this book. (You try protecting your family from a Terminator with nothing but a corkscrew…)

The book contains four lengthy stories. “Tempest”, “Secondary Objectives” and “The Enemy Within” form one continuous narrative, while “One Shot” is a side-story (with beautiful Matt Wagner artwork) of a Terminator going after a Sarah Connor who didn’t get into the phone book quick enough for Arnold to find her in the first film.

The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 1, James Robinson and Others, Dark Horse, tpb, 352pp.