The Christmas season can be a mixed bag. On the one hand, you have the chance to spend time with your family, receive gifts, eat good food, and take time off work. On the other hand, you might have to fight through crowds at the mall and deal with an avalanche of very complex and very costly plans. The Terminator: Santa Claus is Coming to Town #1 might make you lean a bit more toward the positive, especially since it takes place in the war-torn future of the first film.
Years after Judgment Day, Christmas is little more than a memory for the human race as they fight for survival. But Skynet doesn’t take the holidays off, and sends a Terminator to infiltrate and kill a resistance cell. How does the Terminator decide to fit in? By stealing a Santa Claus suit. That’s right, this is a Christmas-themed Terminator tale featuring a Terminator dressed up like Saint Nick. This is just a taste of how The Terminator: Santa Claus is Coming to Town #1 balances between the absurd and the horrifying.
Paulina Ganucheau is partly responsible for this, as her script takes time to focus on the resistance cell and their leader, Ava – one of the few people who knows what the world was like post-Judgment Day. The Terminator franchise has often struggled to develop any human characters who aren’t the Connors, so I’m glad Ganucheau is continuing in the footsteps of Declan Shalvey by delivering a great standalone story and fleshing out more of the post-Judgment Day timeline. She also keeps the same mix of humor and action that powered her work on Dynamite’s Powerpuff Girls comic, including some one-liners that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud of.
Dynamite
Elizabeth Goode is the other half of the strange, yet amazing equation that fuels The Terminator: Santa Claus is Coming to Town #1. Her art style feels similar to the type of Christmas specials you might see on TV around this time of year, albeit with a Terminator-style twist. Goode’s colors match the apocalyptic gray of the post-Judgment Day timeline, broken up by flashes of color – especially red, in the case of the Terminator’s stolen Santa suit and its ever-glowing red eyes. True to the films, whenever things switch to the Terminator’s point of view, everything is tinged with red while Jeff Eckleberry’s lettering takes on a more computerized form.
The highlight of this one-shot features the rebels fighting to stay one step ahead of the Terminator-Santa. Here’s where the mix of ridiculousness and horror kicks in; the former comes from a grown man in a Santa Claus suit shrugging off gunfire and the Terminator’s endoskeleton being visible as it takes enough damage, but the latter features resistance soldiers getting their heads stomped in and necks snapped. Through it all, there’s a note of hope as Ava consoles the youngest soldier, Chris, with tales of how Christmas used to be. That keeps him going, and that kind of hope is a gift in and of itself.
The Terminator: Santa Claus is Coming to Town #1 brings the Terminator’s signature horror style to the holiday season, while maintaining a balance between the humorous and the horrific. The next time you think your holiday is going wrong, count your blessings that you aren’t being stalked by a killer robot in a Santa suit.
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