The Terrifics #16 // Review
From silver age love letter to run of the mill superhero comic, the unique flavor of the series has shifted dramatically. Gene Luen Yang and Stephen Segovia do their best to pick up where Jeff Lemire left the series, but the inspiration is just not there. With unimaginative adversaries and obstacles for the team to deal with to the loss of character development on the cast outside of Mr. and Mrs. Terrific, the title just doesn’t have anything of what made it great previously. Standing as the final series from the New Age of Heroes line, the life of this title stands in uncertainty.
After the disrupted date from the previous issue, The Terrifics come face to face with a swarm of robotic gnats. With that team still trapped within a simulation, Plastic Man is convinced this is an act of God in the spirit of the Nine Plagues of Egypt. The new villain Pixelix makes another brief appearance making ominous claims about another more powerful faceless adversary above her. Meeting with a group of humanoid fly creatures, the team is outfitted with a new digital armory for this video game landscape they find themselves within. Coming in contact with the creator of the realm, the issue closes out with a somewhat anticlimactic ending.
Stephen Segovia’s character work is for the most part serviceable for the title, but more often than not, it is the backgrounds that seem to fall by the wayside. The niche group of characters all have unique and fun power sets that just never seem to be visually utilized in any exciting way by Segovia, although that could be attributed to the scripts. All of the inspiration just seems to be lacking from the series, and the art does no extra work even to attempt to elevate the material. Protobunker does his best to paint each page in that beautifully saturated high gloss and manages to totally create the aesthetic for the series.
Gene Luen Yang seems to be spinning his wheels already with these first two issues of his run. Things just seemingly happen without any rhyme or reason outside of giving Doc Shaner something to draw for the cover. Not even servicing the plot, Yang seems to be trying to fill a trade and bloating his issues with fluff instead of taking the time to create an engaging, worthwhile take on a favorite fan team following a prolific writer such as Jeff Lemire.
The complete 180-degree turn for this series will be detrimental to its survival unless something changes, fast. With the lack of inspired scripts to work from Segovia is left to twiddle his thumbs while Yang looks for a way to make his issues longer without anything actually happening. As August solicits make their rounds, the series will seemingly live for the time being. It would be a shame for such a unique and exciting team to fall into obscurity.
Grade: B-
