War is hell. Hadn’t ever been anything different. Private first class Edward Duggan never expected anything else in Vietnam. He didn’t expect a VC robot to come after him, though. THAT much was something that he wasn’t prepared for. There’s so much more coming after him that he’s not prepared for in Terminator #3. Writer Declan Shalvey concludes his Vietnam-era Terminator tale in an issue drawn to the page by artist David O’Sullivan. The issue also features an opening chapter to a new serial written by Sal Crivelli with art by Colin Craker. 

It’s somewhere else after Vietnam. It’s not necessarily a place of war, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a place of peace. The police officer is attacking someone with his bare fists. THere’s something strange about it. It’s not just the fact that he’s like...ON TOP of the guy he’s attacking. That’s strange enough. Police officer don’t generally get quite that aggressive. There’s something strange about it that goes well beyond that, though. Maybe it’s the fact that one of the officer’s fists looks like a robotic arm. Maybe it’s the fact that part of his face gets torn away to reveal a partial metal visage with a glowing red eye. 

The second part of Shalvey’s “Apocalypse Then” story ends up having a great deal of energy that mixes the abstract with the earthbound. Specifics of the background are left firmly out of page and panel as the terminator unit closes-in on a gritty showdown. It’s a fairly brutal story that covers a lot of ground without being terribly explicit about a whole lot. Crivelli’s “Buried Alive” feels like an intriguing opening to what could easily turn into something pretty remarkable under the right circumstances. The opening pages certainly set-up a very interesting premise. 

O’Sullivan has a great talent for framing the action in a way that implies relentless brutality without showing it directly on the page. The basic visual vocabulary of a terminator story is well-established. It’s really only a matter of bringing it to the page in a way that feels suitably powerful. Some of the framing certainly borrows quite a lot from the tradition that had been established by Francis Ford Coppola in the movie that serves as the inspiration for the title of the story. Craker’s rendering in the opening of the issue’s second story might feel a bit more crisp than O’Sullivan’s in the first feature, but the framing of the action feels a bit less well-executed. The visual premise that Crivelli is delivering for that second feature could have been brought to the page with a bit more brutality. That being said, O’Sullivan’s delivery of human drama hits the mark with great emotional weight.

The basics of the Terminator premise is brought to the page with some interesting finesse in the series’ third issue. There remains a great deal of potential in a series that could travel across time with lots of different angles to many different action locations. Soulless time travelling robot hunters could serve many different themes in many different allegories. The current Dynamite Entertainment series has only scratched the sruface in its third issue. 

Grade: B