Terrorwar #8 - Image Comics

TERRORWAR No. 8, December 2023

Just what Saladin Ahmed’s actual intention was for this particular comic’s narrative is arguably up for some debate, due to its storyline seemingly spiralling all over the place before it finally returns to show Muhammad Cho’s team once again facing down Safehaven’s security troopers. In fact, in many ways the “Eisner-winning writer” appears to frustratingly imbue as little strategy into this book’s puzzling plot as the Terrorfighter’s chief does for storming the Upper Levels of Blue City; “I suppose I’m not surprised that you apparently charged in here with no plan. But I do wonder what in the name of the all-merciful you hoped to achieve?”

Leading this bemusing assault upon the reader’s sense of logic is probably the bizarre realisation that having somehow managed to finally confront the “morally bankrupt” Ronali at the very top of the government official’s heavily-armed metropolis, the storyline’s battle-weary central protagonists simply try to scold her into submission. So naïve a scheme genuinely seems laughable with hindsight, but at the time is so unexpected that it probably fooled half the audience into believing the empty-handed contractors were planning some sort of table-turning deception which just never materialises.

What happens next though is debatably even worse, as all of Cho’s comrades-in-arms individually undergo some sort of cerebral attack from the Terrors they’re now trying to protect. This incredibly convoluted scene, which supposedly depicts the sentient creatures eventually merging with their would-be saviours like a certain "sentient alien symbiote" co-created by Todd McFarlane, takes up the vast majority of the twenty-four-page periodical, and probably to the more cynically-minded bibliophile was only penned/pencilled to pad the series out for just one more issue.

Slightly more convincing is Dave Acosta’s pencilling, at least until the battered crew undergo the aforementioned mind games by their eventual psychic partners-in-crime. The “superstar horror artist” does a grand job in imbuing Muhammad’s attempt to out-fly some attack drones in a conveniently stolen jet-car, with all the pomp and pace a person might expect from an adrenalin-packed action sequence. Yet once the likes of Rosie start being assailed by imaginary giant numbers, the sketches disappointingly seem a little lack-lustre – almost as if the illustrator (or perhaps Inker Jay Leisten) needed to get the panels finished within a certain time limit.

Written by: Saladin Ahmed, Pencils by: Dave Acosta, Inks by: Jay Leisten, and Colors by: Walter Pereyra