When you find true peace and place in the universe, can you give it all up?
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter Milligan
Art: Piotr Kowalski
What They Say:
Last issue! Rory Fletcher has come face to face with the dangerous Mia and Minesh and now he must overcome the strange worlds that their awful drug-addicted powers create. In this final issue of Terminal Hero an old enemy reappears, forcing Rory to face once again the hideous reality of the Tumour Kid. Can Rory survive Mia and Minesh and escape the terrible Tumour monster? Can he escape the death sentence that began this entire journey? And after this final, bruising, shocking issue, will he be in any fit state to return to his adoptive family, waiting for him in California?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Terminal Hero really went into some unusual places with the addition of Mia and Minesh recently and that culminated in a really surprising meeting between them in the previous installment that has Mia trying to, well, fix Rory. Considering how screwed up Rory is, and how much of a mess the other two are in reality, it’s amusing to see her reaching in and trying to deal with the darkness that is inside of Rory. He’s such a font of negativity into the world, for good reason, that it certainly makes sense that they’d want to help since he’s like them in all the important ways. And there’s not a lot of them in the world either, for obvious reasons, making it all the more important to make sure he survives and is free from that problem.
So, having that confrontation right from the start here as Rory goes after the tumor and sickness inside of him is an intriguing way of presenting things, since it has such a twisted and terrible look about it that really paints it in the proper light. With Rory going in to kill it himself, having now aligned for the moment with Mia and Minesh, it’s definitely a darkly beautiful sequence, especially with the colors used for it, as the trio work against the cancer and we get them obliterating it in a truly spectacular way. What’s really fascinating though is Rory’s reaction to it all as the smell and sense of the cancer that has been with him for so long is now gone and he’s starting to realize that there’s hope for a future for him, and that’s just so surprising that he doesn’t know how to cope with it or how to really react to it.
Which is why it makes sense that he ends up joining Minesh and Mia in a couple of weeks of very messed up sex/merging/blending of mind and body. It’s an experience that opens him up to things he could never have dreamed of, to truly feel connected and at one with someone and at peace while writing amid all of it. Naturally, all of it is just confusing as hell for him as he knows he can’t stay with that as he wants different things in life, and the whole MI6 aspect complicates it all as well. That it devolves into a plan to try and kill them so that their darkness doesn’t impact anyone else isn’t a surprise, but it all just goes wonky in general and instead places their comatose bodies into the hands of MI6 for research purposes. Suffice to say, while Rory gets his new fake life back in California, things don’t really end on a positive note here.
In Summary:
Terminal Hero started off in a way that was chaotic and crazy, but it had a lot of trademark Milligan moments that had me dive into it in a big way. As it progressed, it followed through on those moments and just got more surreal. But it also found itself in a place where it could go in only so many directions because of the level of darkness it had worked with and the fact that it was getting really, really hard to care about Rory – or anyone else – in the book. The conclusion here works well to bring everything to the proper point and obviously there’s always room to sneak in some new material along the way, but Terminal Hero feels like it’s reached a concluding point here where it’s best left as is. Rory and what he went through was definitely engaging and had some surprising moments, but it also feels like it’s a hard title to apply the word hero to.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: February 18th, 2014
MSRP: $2.99
