Dark Horse Comics did a phenomenal job with the license for The Terminator, especially as they were producing comics prior to there being an official sequel.

With just the grim, gritty, pseudo slasher movie style of the first film to go on, so too did the initial comics tend to have a darker, creepier feel to them, and that’s perhaps never more evident than in the one-off The Terminator: One-Shot, which ended up being released a month prior to Terminator 2: Judgment Day hitting the big screen.

With it being the 40th anniversary of The Terminator, what better time is there to revisit one of the sagas grungiest, and most interesting, early comic book entries?

In One-Shot (which is also the terminology for a comic which is a complete story in one issue, and not part of an ongoing series; clever, eh?), it’s revealed that Skynet had sent a Terminator back to the past just before the Resistance witnessed the Schwarzenegger model T-800’s departure (his version of the T-800 being the T-101), which led to them sending Kyle Reese to stop it.

This second, or rather first, Terminator is a female T-800, and she uses a slightly more advanced method than the T-101 model of the T-800; she accesses a modem, rather than heading for the phone book. As the electronic records have more recently updated listings, her first target is a recently married Sarah Lang, who’s just married a Michael Connor (interestingly, the panel that reveals this for the first time erroneously refers to Michael Connor as John Connor, though he’s referred to correctly as Michael in every other instance in the comic!).

Sarah owns an art gallery in LA, but she’s currently on her honeymoon with Michael in San Francisco, leading the Terminator away from the other Sarah Connors, including the one Skynet is trying to target, which of course the T-101 will end up pursuing.

So who’s going to stop this female T-800? Well, just as the T-101 wasn’t the only Terminator sent back to the past, it turns out that the Resistance had their own plans, sending a few other soldiers back to different points in Sarah Connor’s past to protect her, in case other Terminators show up during her lifetime.

Ex-cop Ruggles has grown old, living a new life in the 20th century, and it’s he who latches onto the fact that a Terminator is on the loose; using components he smuggled back in time (in a very uncomfortable way, as we’re informed), he intends to put a stop to this threat, before it can kill the honeymooning Sarah Connor, and make its way to the others.

For a one off comic, there’s a fairly plot heavy script here; acclaimed comics writer James Robinson adding little wrinkles, including a plot to kill Michael Connor for his inheritance, that keeps things somewhat unpredictable, and denser than you may expect.

Matt Wagner’s art, which appears to be at least partially painted, is somewhat abstract in nature and really has the scratchy, surreal aesthetic of late 80s and early 90s indie comics. Comics of this type often had a very dark and depressing tone, and there’s a similar ambience here, with its doomed central couple and the sad, final mission for the aging Ruggles (and his pet monkey, Peanut).

Wagner’s work here is genuinely phenomenal, and given that this comic would likely have been picked up by many readers attracted by the Terminator license, whose only experience of comics would likely have been mostly mainstream fare, it must have been quite an eye opener at the time. Though I did read the Terminator comics I could get my hands on back then, I don’t recall seeing or reading One-Shot at the time, but comics tended to have a simple colour palette and blocks of single colours; this type of work always blew my mind, as it was so often used just for covers. When utilised for entire stories, it was genuinely potent stuff, and felt incredibly mature. That’s definitely the case here, where the art is used to stunning effect.

Though the story itself is incredibly downbeat, and the inheritance subplot makes this Sarah Connor particularly unlikeable, it’s still genuinely compelling. It’s the kind of story I would have absolutely adored as an early teen; it actually holds up really well over 30 years later. That’s from the point of view both of its script, and Matt Wagner’s impressive artwork. Where most of its contemporaries have aged somewhat poorly, The Terminator: One-Shot is still an impressive slice of time travel-based neo noir.