Walt Simonson’s art is the star of the show in RoboCop vs The Terminator; this final issue sees Simonson given some great stuff to work with by writer Frank Miller, as the story reaches its frankly bonkers conclusion.

The RoboCop/Terminator hybrid is now built, with Alex Murphy’s consciousness having waited for decades to take action and fight SkyNet to stop the bleak, machine-led future from coming to fruition.

Despite more bleakness here, there’s some unusual optimism from Frank Miller – though the way the timestream fixes itself around what’s currently happening is a little odd, there’s a satisfying conclusion here.

There’s also a pretty funny final scene too.

Yet Miller just can’t help himself with the casual sexism, which rears its ugly head yet again, in a sequence that feels pretty superfluous.

RoboCop vs The Terminator is an interesting experiment from a very different time; though comics purportedly came of age in the 90s, they spent most of the decade in a state of perpetual puberty, with supposedly dark and edgy content being sold as ‘for mature readers’, despite being incredibly juvenile for the most part.

RoboCop vs The Terminator is a great example of so many things that weren’t quite right with comics in the 90s; what once felt impossibly cool and edgy now often seems like bad taste, toxic masculinity writ large.

That said, when Miller gets out of Simonson’s way and lets the action speak for itself without his heavy handed commentary, it works wonders.

I’m glad crossovers like this made it to print, but it’s also good to realise how far we’ve come in the last thirty years too.