A lot of worlds but little interest.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Dale Eaglesham
Colors: Mike Atiyeh
Letterer: Tom Napolitano
What They Say:
The Terrifics find themselves stuck up a cosmic tree with the newly rediscovered Tom Strong—and the fire department ain’t coming to rescue them! The team gets split up while trying to escape this devious trap set for them by a mysterious enemy known as Doc Dread, and they wind up in a bunch of weird dimensions trippier than a spin on the “Yellow Submarine”! Is there a cure awaiting our afflicted adventurers at the end of this other-dimensional adventure? Or will Plastic Man, Metamorpho, Phantom Girl and Mr. Terrific be trapped in Tom Strong’s stronghold peddling snake oil instead?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Terrifics hits its eighth issue and finally got to that point where I found I could jump off of it. I’ve talked about struggling with this book over its run as I liked the ideas and characters but the execution just hasn’t worked at all for me. Jeff Lemire comes across more as mildly managing the book and working with the artists handling the flow and nature of the stories, which works well and fine, but the stories just aren’t clicking for me at all. I really like what Dale Eaglesham is doing in this arc with the artwork and the worlds he gets to play with, including Funnyland this time around, but at the same time the pacing and tone of everything is pretty much what keeps me from most mainstream/popular superhero books. This one, in particular, feels like a 90’s throwback in some of its worst ways.
Escaping from the Forest of Eternity at the start with the help of Tom Strong gets us a decent bringing together of the team that comes with a critical point; all the bouncing around they’ve done has broken the bond that they shared of dark energy, allowing them to now go in all sorts of directions. It was a simple gimmick at the start and forced them together but it felt like it was really hampering storytelling more than enhancing it so I’m not sad to see this device go. This also allows them to now go explore the different areas to try and figure out what’s going on since there are a couple of portals and several people to work with. That has Rex and Linnya ending up in a place called the Aztech Empire while Plas and Deuce end up in Funnyland where they face off against Duckter Dread. Mister Terrific and Tom Strong end up in Slaughter Swamp outside of Gotham in what feels like the here and now.
Add in a subplot with Sapphire getting a mild proposal by Java as he thinks Rex won’t be back and you get a fairly busy issue. The three portal locations have a couple of pages each where we see things going on, and get introduced to characters like Tesla Strong and Warren Strong, and the potential of Swamp Thing has me a little interested. But mostly it’s just like past arcs with different locations that will have events drawing everyone back together. It’s too scattered but too predictable. I did at least like what we got out of Funnyland even if it had me stupidly hopeful that it’d be a Captain Carrot world.
In Summary:
I gave it eight issues but the problems only seemed to grow as it went along and the unfocused nature of the series simply didn’t keep my attention. When a book I have a subscription to shifts from anticipated or neutral to dread, that’s time to start jumping off it unless you can see how it might turn around in the short term. I didn’t see any potential for that here unfortunately.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: Septembe 26th, 2018
MSRP: $2.99
