The Terminator, Dark Horse Comics, 1990

The Terminator Comic Book series

Dark Horse, 1990

The first company to obtain a license to produce comic books for the 'Terminator' franchise was Now Comics, aka Caputo Publishing, which ran a series for 17 issues, from September 1988 to February 1990. Dark Horse took over the franchise that same year, issuing a four-issue miniseries from August to November.

 

Since that time the franchise has bounced around from one publisher to another, with mixed success. As of the end of 2025, Dynamite ended a 10-issue run.

 

I recently picked up the four-issue Dark Horse run from 1990. 

Back in those days Dark Horse still was very much an indie start-up, with a small staff, and the same creative teams handled multiple properties. For the Terminator series, the writer was John Arcudi, who seemingly wrote almost every licensed property that Dark Horse published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The artist was Chris Warner, who also was involved with many titles in the Aliens and Predator franchise from that era.

 

The inaugural Dark Horse Terminator incarnation starts things off in Los Angeles in 2029, with another iteration of the storyline in which resistance fighters, under the direction of John Connor, infiltrate a Skynet facility with the aim of destroying a time travel apparatus.

Needless to say, the apparatus gets used; in this case, to transport both a team of resistance fighters, and a team of Terminators, to the Los Angeles of 1990. 

It's unclear if writer Arcudi had access to the script for the second Terminator film, which began photography in October 1990. But his storyline leverages the plot point in which the mangled remains and technologies of the first Terminator are exploited by avaricious entrepreneurs, thus setting the stage for the advent of Skynet and 'Judgment Day.'

The two teams engage in mayhem throughout L.A. as they vie to identify and abduct the magnate who is in possession of the Terminator remains. Having the police on their trails only complicates things, and there is quite a bit of violent action (some of it involving a ray gun that the Terminators manage to smuggle with them into their journey back in time).

 

 

Over-writing was an almost universal failing of comic books published in the 1990s but Arcudi avoids, it, keeping the plot relatively straightforward, with a few twists added in the final issue signalling that Dark Horse would be continuing the series (which they did in 1991-1992).

Warner's artwork is serviceable, no better and no worse than a lot of the artwork appearing in comic books that year, including one of the top-selling titles, Uncanny X-Men (below). 

 

The color printing, as was the case for many comics of this era, is less than ideal (although in fairness, my scans of these 35 year-old pages tend to shift the red tones towards the pink end of the spectrum). 

 

Uncanny X-Men #266, August 1990, from 'Major Spoilers'

Summing up, 'The Terminator' likely will appeal to diehard fans of the franchise, but others won't see much here to get excited about. You can pick up the 4 issues for under $10 each at online comic book stores. My advice is to spend a bit more and get the best of the Dark Horse Terminator incarnations, 1992's Robocop Vs. Terminator.