[Guest reviewer Zach King writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

In an earlier review, I had quietly observed that my first encounter with the Terminator franchise was in a crossover comic. (I’ve mentioned it twice, actually.) Our gracious host noticed, and so it is at his invitation that this review finds me revisiting a staple of my early comics diet, a crossover mini I read ad infinitum when it hit the stands in 1999.

Even though I had never seen a Terminator film, all the same I was fascinated by Superman vs. The Terminator: Death to the Future, written by Alan Grant and illustrated by Steve Pugh & Mike Perkins. Surely I was aware of the iconography of Terminators - skeletal killer robots from a near and inevitable future - but I’m certain that I didn’t watch one of the films until 2003’s Rise of the Machines. I can’t recall exactly what made me start there, but I’m certain Superman had something to do with it.

More than twenty years later, Death to the Future holds up for this reader, though I’m acutely aware of the rosy hue my glasses took on during this latest reread. This crossover miniseries also serves as a fascinating time capsule — for a franchise before a threequel, for that faded Y2K hysteria, and for the fin de siècle Superman titles. Those last two in particular dovetail together in context; while Death to the Future was debuting, Superman was fighting Brainiac 13 in the Superman titles proper, which were just about to close the door on the Triangle Era.¹

Indeed, despite taking place outside the bounds of continuity, Death to the Future is very of its moment. Superboy appears in his Tom Grummett leather jacket, while Supergirl is sporting her fiery wings, a reminder of that time that Peter David’s protoplasmic Matrix learned she had become an earth-bound angel after merging with the human Linda Danvers. Meanwhile, Steel appears (albeit in the future) in his Priest-era suit, while Cyborg Superman is rocking his orange metallic design. For Superman fans of a certain stripe, this late-'90s style sheet feels like home, with its particular quirks serving as window dressing on an otherwise timeless Super-family dynamic.

Comparatively, Alan Grant stages the series with no particular placement in the Terminator timeline, other than to say that John Connor doesn’t seem to have aged since 1991’s T2: Judgment Day. The action begins when John unthinkingly divulges his real name in order to win a bicycle at a shopping mall, creating a ripple in time that allows the Terminators to find John and his mother Sarah (who, in Pugh’s pencils, is close enough to Linda Hamilton to be recognizable, but not so close as to invite lawsuits). I might have thought that John would have been sufficiently hardened not to make such a rookie mistake, but then again an inciting incident has to come from somewhere.

Helpfully, Superman has never encountered a Terminator before, leading to a fair few panels of the Man of Steel standing around befuddled while the Connors fill in the backstory. Inked by Perkins, Pugh draws the dickens out of the Terminators, making their skull heads terrifying. Pugh is equally grim in the future sequences, where we end up spending a good amount of time. As in Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong, the plot needs to keep Superman off the board for a while, so Grant shunts Superman into the distant future of 2032, where he is accidentally pulled by his old (and aged) friend Steel into the fight against Skynet. These dystopian sequences prime the pump for similar moments in Terminator Salvation and Genisys, and the way Grant uses Superman amid the resistance is particularly ingenious. (If only we’d had a sequence in a Command-D bunker!)

Death to the Future also seems to anticipate Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines with its introduction of the Terminatrix, a leather-clad female Terminator with a pixie cut and a permanent sneer. The Terminatrix is not quite Kristanna Loken’s T-X, and it’s not a great leap to imagine “Terminator, but lady” as the next step in cyborg evolution. Looking like something straight out of The Matrix,² the Terminatrix doesn’t do much in the plot, but she does serve as a fun conceptual sidekick for the crossover’s main villain, Cyborg Superman. (In another continuity, perhaps she might have become the Cyborg’s Punchline or Harley Quinn.) Throughout, Grant and especially Pugh keep the Terminators coming, with their omnipresent waves of cannon fodder making them feel like an inescapable doom; if the Terminatrix is dramatically inert, the nameless hordes of fleshy androids are suitably scary.

With Superman facing Skynet in 2032, Cyborg Superman ends up being the primary villain in the present, feeding information to his allies in the future — such that, at one point, Skynet “learns” about Kryptonite and prepares to use it against Superman. This plot device creates a fun wibbly-wobbly approach to time travel that, if nothing else, Doctor Who fans would certainly enjoy. But while it seems a natural fit for Cyborg Superman to join forces with Skynet, Grant writes Hank Henshaw with a surprising amount of tech supremacy. I hadn’t recalled Henshaw ever quite embracing his metal parts with the same “All flesh must perish!” gusto we see in the crossover’s final issue. Even so, Cyborg Superman is just about the perfect midpoint between Metropolis and Skynet, and it’s interesting to wonder how much of Skynet’s hatred for mankind comes from Henshaw.

As sequel teases go, Death to the Future ends with Lex Luthor revealing that he’s stolen a piece of Terminator technology. In an editorial note, Grant winks toward one of his earlier Terminator comics, Death Valley, and Pugh’s choreography is downright cinematic in a last page that regretfully never bore further fruit. Every time I see a new Terminator film, I return to this miniseries and wonder: Might Luthor have been a silent partner in Cyberdyne? Could there have been a way to take the sophisticated AI Brainiac of the DCAU and tie him to the development of Skynet? Could a new crossover possibly employ the notion of Hypertime to account for the disparate Terminator timelines? (Crisis on Infinite Skynets?) With the death of Alan Grant in 2022, I’m not sure who might take up the mantle — unlike, say, Aliens or Predator, The Terminator never crossed over with the DC Universe again. Now that the property is at Dynamite (with writer/artist Declan Shalvey), one wonders if the future might live again; DC has had good luck with Dynamite of late³, and crossover comics seem to be coming back into vogue these days.

[Superman vs. The Terminator: Death to the Future was collected in a standalone trade in 2000. It was later reprinted in 2016 as part of DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Justice League Vol. 1. The latter collection also includes Superman vs. Predator, Batman/Hellboy/Starman, and Ghost/Batgirl. Regrettably, both volumes are currently out of print.]