The Terminator franchise is one of the most beloved Sci-Fi series of all time, and one of the main reasons why (aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unarguable badassery) is because it’s a franchise that’s not afraid to evolve. While The Terminator is centered around a villainous artificial intelligence called Skynet and its killer robot sentinels, the series is actually more rooted in time travel. With every trip through time, The Terminator effectively throws its own series into different timelines, allowing for endless variations of its own canon.
Sometimes the changes made to The Terminator’s timeline are minuscule, like how the date of Judgment Day was moved from August 29, 1997, in Terminator 2 to July 25, 2004, in Terminator 3. However, other times, The Terminator universe is thrown into entirely different established realities because of the temporal meddling by both Skynet and humanity, which is something that’s explored to the fullest extent in Terminator comics. Here are 10 best Terminator comic book story arcs that fans of the franchise won’t want to miss!
Ever since RoboCop was introduced in the landscape of ‘80s Sci-Fi/Action, fans have wondered how he’d fare against a T-800 Terminator given their similarities as cybernetic badasses. While the popular YouTube channel Death Battle! actually committed an episode to answering that question, Dark Horse Comics did one better many years prior in the form of the epic crossover miniseries: RoboCop vs The Terminator.
This series revealed that RoboCop’s very existence was actually how Skynet first came online, though once Officer Murphy learned this dark truth, he fought against the very machines he supposedly gave life to. This alternate origin for The Terminator came as a result of the aforementioned temporal meddling, and fans were happy that it did, as it gave life to one of the coolest Terminator comics ever created.
When considering the greatest Sci-Fi/Action series of the ‘80s, the ‘big three’ have always been The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator – so, naturally, Dark Horse Comics brought them all together in one insanely awesome storyline. Not only did this miniseries show Predators fighting Terminators, Terminators fighting Xenomorphs, and Xenomorphs fighting Predators (as would be expected in any AvP title), it also took things one step further.
The main goal of the Terminators in this storyline (which takes place after the events of Alien: Resurrection), is to make a major comeback following the fall of Skynet. To do that, the Terminators find a way to merge themselves with the Xenomorph species, resulting in a true biomechanical nightmare.
This alternate Terminator timeline shows fans a world where humans have long-been extinct, and the war of the future is raging between the Terminators and the Transformers. Humans developed Terminators to fight the Transformers after the Decepticons tried to conquer the planet. However, after Skynet became self-aware, the Terminators decided the world belonged to them, not the humans or the Transformers, and humankind became extinct soon afterward. But even though humans were no longer around, the Terminators were not guaranteed to win this war, so they did what they always do: traveled back in time.
A Terminator was sent through time to kill the first Decepticons that came to Earth, and when it arrived in the past, the Terminator teamed up with Autobots to accomplish that goal. However, after Megatron was killed, his body was found by the company responsible for creating Terminators, and his corpse was used to create a new class of Terminators, resulting in a deadly new evolution (and a nail-biting cliffhanger to the entire series).
When The Terminator universe crossed over with DC Comics continuity, Superman found himself right in the middle of the temporal war between man and machine. While protecting John and Sarah Connor, Superman encounters a number of Terminators that were sent back in time to kill them. But, they weren’t like other Terminators, they were Super-Terminators. In the future, Skynet finds a way to adapt some of Superman’s powers into its Terminators, and then sends those Terminators back in time in the hopes that they’d prove stronger than the Man of Steel, and finally succeed in killing John Connor.
While these ‘Super-Terminators’ were formidable, the one killer-robot that was really a challenge for Superman actually wasn’t a robot at all, but a cyborg: specifically, Cyborg Superman. When Hank Henshaw discovered Terminator tech, he merged his own cybernetics with it, and became ‘Skynet-Superman’. In this form, Henshaw’s power arguably surpassed Superman, as the Man of Steel had to infect Skynet-Superman with a virus in order to beat him rather than simply being more powerful, meaning Skynet literally created a Terminator not even Superman could beat.
This Terminator storyline may not contain an exciting crossover with another fan-favorite property, but it certainly makes up for it by making the Terminators themselves the most heavy metal they’ve ever been – at least, one Terminator. A Terminator designated C890.L travels back in time with another Terminator to kill a target, but when that other Terminator gets terminated, C890.L ensures that none of its parts go to waste.
C890.L cannibalizes its fallen companion, integrating its parts into its own body. The result is an all-new design for the Terminator, one with deadly spikes all over its body, and gnarly horns atop its head – and it’s for that reason that C890.L takes on a new moniker: Horns. The wider storyline of Terminator: The Enemy Within is intriguing, to be sure, but the biggest takeaway has to be the heavy metal redesign that gave life to Horns.
Terminator 2: Infinity shows readers a future where Skynet is defeated by the Resistance, though that shouldn’t imply this story has a happy ending. When the AI realizes it has been beaten, Skynet uses its last few moments to develop a prototype Terminator, one that is combined with time travel technology itself: the T-Infinity. The goal was to design a Terminator that could pinpoint anomalies in the timeline and ‘fix’ them by instantaneously traveling to that moment and doing Skynet’s murderous bidding.
Every instance where Skynet could have won a victory, but was thwarted, was subsequently ‘corrected’ by the T-Infinity, and it had more than enough power to do so. The T-Infinity was fueled by the power to travel through time, which offered the T-Infinity a number of insane upgrades the classic T-800 couldn’t even fathom, including plasma cannons, force fields, and energy blades. If for no other reason than to see this god-tier Terminator in action, Terminator fans need to read Terminator 2: Infinity.
It was confirmed in the very first installment of the series – 1984’s The Terminator – that a human couldn’t travel through time with any non-organic object, not even clothing. That’s actually one of the reasons why Skynet developed synthetic skin for its T-800s, so it could send its own soldiers back in time to combat the Resistance. However, The Terminator: One Shot reveals that it actually is possible to smuggle a non-organic object through time, even a powerful weapon like the electro-mech fazer, though it’s immensely agonizing.
To bring something back in time, a human has to embed the object within their body. Truthfully, the Resistance probably looked to the Terminators to figure this out, as their robotic endoskeletons were able to travel through time just fine wrapped in synthetic skin. However, the cost for a human to do this is painful, especially given that the time traveler in this story smuggled the aforementioned electro-mech fazer (a weapon that can kill a Terminator with just one shot) beneath his flesh. This comic expands Terminator lore in a fascinating way, even if it is utterly horrific.
The T-1000 (otherwise known as the ‘Liquid-Metal Terminator’) made its debut in T2, while the T-X was introduced in Terminator 3. The T-X seemed to be a hybrid of the classic T-800 and the T-1000, as it was semi-liquid metal, but with a solid endoskeleton. That made fans question if the T-X was even an upgrade from the T-1000, as the T2 Terminator seemed more untouchable than this ‘improved’ model. However, that debate was put to rest in Terminator 3: Before the Rise, as that comic pitted the T-1000 and the T-X against each other – and the T-X won.
This comic book miniseries did a lot to answer any unanswered questions that were left open in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, as well as bridge the gap between that film and T2. That alone makes this comic well worth reading, but it’s hard to argue against the fact that the real reason to pick up Before the Rise is that it finally resolved one of the biggest fan debates in Terminator history.
The Terminator: The Dark Years throws fans into the future of 2030, where John Connor is leading a team of Resistance fighters into the heart of a Terminator facility to gather information and shut the facility down for good. Throughout the mission, John is paranoid that someone on his team is a spy, and once they make it into the facility, he realizes just how right he was to be worried.
John Connor learns that Skynet has developed a way to mind-control humans and use them as sleeper agents within the Resistance. These agents of Skynet weren’t Terminators or even cyborgs, they were full-blooded humans – and some were even people he knew well and trusted. However, they had been compromised by Skynet’s greatest weapon, a weapon that this comic reveals was never the Terminators themselves.