Staff Picks (June): Terminarch

The cool thing about Jordan Hart’s sci-fi dystopia Terminarch is its ability to take iconic tropes and turn them on their head.  Combining elements of a robot uprising in the spirit of The Terminator with the androids reminiscent of the Replicants in Blade Runner, the framework of the story seems like familiar territory.  But the familiarity stops there.  Typically, a machine-led extermination of humanity is the result of some computer determining the human race is too chaotic to survive, but these machines actually revere humanity.  Humans can do one thing the androids can’t – create art.  In an effort to preserve the world for artists, to effectively put them on a pedestal, all non-artists are eradicated.

Of course, no robot apocalypse is complete without a John Connor, and Terminarch gives us ours in the form of Martin Allerton, a hermit who has no idea the world has changed until he is pulled into the fight. Through his experience, we learn that artists were given a god-like celebrity in the new society, with the androids believing they had created a utopia for their idols.  Where some of the surviving humans embraced their role in the new world, many others took their own lives in grief, and a few started a revolution. Brought in to unite the various rebel factions, Allerton finds the epicenter of what makes this story so provocative -- the artists who would historically be seen protesting a war have now been called upon to lead one.

Flipping another familiar idea on its head, the artists in Terminarch will have to “make war, not love.”

—Trevor Richardson

Publisher: OSSM Comics Item Code: JUN161690 Release Date: 08/31/16 SRP: $6.99