1991 pencil samples for TERMINATOR: HUNTERS AND KILLERS miniseries

So, yeah, lo these many years ago, I worked up a pitch for a Terminator project for Dark Horse Comics while I was wrapping up the last issue of Dirty Pair: Plague of Angels. As Soviet military hardware, especially submarines, had been a childhood obsession of mine, I based a story on the idea of human resistance fighters in the Kamchatka peninsula seizing a Typhoon-class ballistic-missile submarine to launch a decapitation strike on Skynet.

Initially I thought I was going to co-write the comic with Toren Smith of Studio Proteus, who had worked with me on the early Dirty Pair miniseries.  Alas, a power struggle over who would actually write the book ensued, a dispute which I ended up losing. This wasn't entirely surprising, as our working relationship had gotten pretty frosty by that point, given how I'd left Toren with not much of a role or input into Plague of Angels. (For the record, this wasn't a deliberate slight on my part, but I no longer needed any help writing comics by that point in my career. My less-than-ideal social skills didn't help the situation, in all likelihood.)

Faced with the unappealing prospect of working as solely the artist on the project (which I've never done at any point in my career), I bailed on the miniseries, which wound up being published as Terminator: Hunters and Killers. This might have been a good call on my part, though, as one other problematic issue with H&K had already arisen: I was supposed to draw the miniseries in a supposedly—brace yourselves—"realistic" art style, as seen in the penciled sample pages above. None of that big-eyed manga crap, folks, as the license holders presumably wouldn't stand for such a thing!

Note that never again would I contemplate altering my art style for a comics project—nor would any editor ever ask me to.

Gotta say that the T-800 looks fine in these sample pages, but the "realistic" humans didn't work out quite so well. Honestly, I have no idea if I could've hacked my way through drawing this project, even if the issue with its writing had somehow been worked out amicably. On the other hand, I probably could've stuck it out for the money, as this miniseries wound up selling over 90,000 copies(!) in those bygone days of yore leading up to the direct market's millions-selling peak. I wouldn't earn any serious "comics caysh" until 6 years later, when I worked on Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone and Gen13 Bootleg.

The real mystery, in retrospect? I have no idea why the hell resistance fighters in the former Soviet Union would be using a g-d British L86A2 Light Support Weapon(!) instead of the obvious choice of an AK or RPD variation, if not an energy weapon of some sort.