Review by Ian Keogh

The Terrifics concludes with a volume over half as big again as any previous outing, and this begins with no Terrifics to be found on Bizarroworld, where the inventions of Mr Terrible have made life miserable for Bizarro. No matter how many times he goes back in time to change things, the outcome’s the same because that’s just the way things work on Htrae. However, on Earth things could be different. Perhaps progress can be stopped.

Some people love Bizarro, the tragic anti-Superman, and some find him a complete pain, but as long as his twisted reverse logic is restricted to a couple of comics every few years he’s tolerable. The Tomorrow War is six long chapters of Bizarro-speak that feel like ten. The best aspects are the visual jokes of the characters changing as time changes around them, with Stephen Segovia’s young kid versions of the Terrifics utterly charming (sample art), and a clever solution transforming a character who’d become redundant. However getting there is a long haul, and it’s still a case of too many artists per story, with Segovia drawing roughly half in his professional, but not very distinctive way.

Read the following story digitally and you’re going to have problems. It’s an adventure where you need to turn to a different page every time you make a decision on behalf of a character, as per Dan Mora’s sample art. Yang put in a lot of effort to design the game, and that planning pays off with the intended fun over thirty pages.

Simon Stagg’s been a fine slimy supporting character all the way through The Terrifics, his deceit causing much of the trouble in The God Game, and in ‘The Day Simon Stagg Died’ there are two fine legacies in his mould. Perhaps more so than other writers, Yang sets up puzzles for the heroes to solve, and the suspicion is that the influx of several under-used heroes in this story is for moments where specific combinations of their powers resolve a problem. It morphs into the title story, but again goes on too long, Phantom Girl might as well not be there for most of the time, and there are places where Yang’s dialogue isn’t the most convincing. “Go, Terrfics, Go” is also overused.

Over four volumes there’s the feeling that The Terrifics only rarely achieved its potential.