The Terminator franchise is set to return to comics, as many of its classic comic stories will receive a well-deserved reprint, courtesy of Dynamite Entertainment. James Cameron’s sci-fi action-horror film arrived in theaters forty years ago, delivering a cinematic masterpiece that has gone on to have a sprawling legacy, spanning every medium of pop culture.
In a story published by The Beat, Dynamite announced a BackerFit campaign to fund the Terminator 40th Anniversary: Graphic Novel Collection. Starting in the late 1980s, many epic Terminator comic stories were produced, and now fans will have access to many of them for the first time in a long time.
More details are set to be revealed when the BackerFit campaign officially starts, though the buzz among Terminator fans began immediately, and will only continue to grow more excited as Dynamite’s project becomes a reality.
Via The Beat, Dynamite released the first details of their thrilling new Terminator imprint, starting with an explanation of why republishing old Terminator comics is just as vital as producing new stories in the medium:
As Dynamite notes, Terminator comics have played an underappreciated role in the enduring success of the franchise. Even before James Cameron’s equally-iconic sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1990, the world of the franchise had begun to be expanded in comic books. Now, Dynamite seeks to highlight these important pop culture artifacts, allowing a new generation of readers to engage with them.
While the exact scope of Dynamite’s effort to return classic Terminator comics to print remains to be determined, it is an exciting development that serves as a perfect celebration of the franchise’s four-decade milestone. The Beat also quoted Dynamite CEO Nick Barrucci as stating that the company’s plans for Terminator include “bringing both new stories and collecting the library of existing comics” to readers in the near future. This adds an entire extra dimension of anticipation to the announcement, as it seems the future and the past of the time-travel series hold exciting things in store.
As Dynamite Entertainment pointed out, comic books have long served as a medium in which the full potential of the Terminator franchise could be explored in detail not afforded by film, or even television. As spectacular as Terminator movies have been over the years, comics offer truly unlimited narrative opportunities. From Skynet fighting Robocop, to going on an interstellar conquest, much of that potential has already been fulfilled – by stories that Dynamite will help find a new audience – while there is still so much more to be done with Terminator comics.
Source: The Beat; BackerFit (Dynamite)