The fourth and final volume of The Terrifics, titled The Tomorrow War, covers the entire last year of the book's run, which covers essentially two stories.
In the first story, Bizarro grows frustrated he can't halt the progress of science on his homeworld of Htrae, which keeps rendering him irrelevant. A discussion with "Mr. Terrible", helps Bizarro realize if progress can't be halted or reversed on his world, that means it can be halted on Earth. So he gathers a team with his world's versions of The Terrifics and sets about trying to reverse time.
This somehow requires them to destroy Phantom Girl's homeworld, at which point Bizarro decides he's having more fun doing that, and starts looping back to relive the experience. Which has disastrous effects on the timeline. The Terrifics have to stop him, yadda yadda.
The second arc involves Mr. Terrific trying to turn Gateway City in a better place, through SCIENCE! Problems naturally arise, but it turns out Mr. Terrific is part of an entire group of super-scientist types, like Ted Kord and Ryan Choi. It's a nice concept, but it swells the cast to an unwieldy degree, especially when most of the existing cast get so little time as it is.
I mentioned it in Saturday Splash Page #93, but the book feels much more like a Mr. Terrific book than a proper ensemble cast. A lot of the focus is on the tension between he and Ms. Terrific, a Laura Holt from another universe who became a costumed hero after her husband Michael died in a car wreck. The two are trying to recreate what they had with their deceased partners, but are finding it difficult. Michael and Laura have very different ideas about what constitutes progress and how to go about achieving it. Specifically, Michael saved a rapidly advancing artificial intelligence that would eventually subjugate all organic life, and Laura thinks that was a terrible mistake. Especially since he made the decision on his own, without consulting anyone else.
Once Laura departs - called away by "some presence" or God, whichever - it's Silas Stone (Cyborg's dad) that Terrific butts heads with. Now because Stone is even more bottom line focused than Mr. Terrific. Maximize the innovations for profit, kill people possessed by little bouncing Parasite heads because it's safer for you than taking the time to figure out how to reverse the process. Essentially science minus any humanity, just efficiency and self-interest.
Gene Luen Yang kills off Simon Stagg, setting up the arrival of a
prodigal son who has his own plans for the city. He spent his years away
in Gotham, so you won't be shocked to learn that those plans are pretty
hazardous to the well-being of the people. This gives Metamorpho the closest he'll get to any focus, as he has to deal with the loss of someone who's been a thorn in his side for years, but means a lot to the most important person in his life. Other than that, his characterization revolves around exclamations involving Egyptian gods or elements ("What the Francium?", for example.)
That's more than Plastic Man or Phantom Girl get. Plas gets to worry about his son a little and stretch (no pun intended) his powers during the fight with his Bizarro-counterpart. Phantom Girl? I know Bgztl ends up OK after all Bizarro's stupidity is undone, but it seems like her homeworld and all her people being repeatedly destroyed for some chalky moron's amusement would have some kind of impact on her. Given she and her mother had an argument the last time they were around each other, you'd expect a bit of time spent on some sort of reconciliation in the aftermath of a near-death experience.
Stephen Segovia draws most of the Bizarro arc, with Sergio Davila handling the conclusion and the "Tomorrow War" arc. Segovia shows more flexibility in his art, able to draw aged-down versions of the cast as time gets wonky, or adopting a stiffer, more heavily inked approach when they're regressed to '90s or '80s versions of themselves (in those issues, his work reminds me a lot of Lenil Francis Yu's, albeit less heavy on the cross-hatching.)
Davilla's work is, not less exaggerated, but exaggerated in a more typical superhero comic way. The oversized muscles and tree trunk necks, that kind of thing. The story doesn't allow for the level of variety Segovia had, but Davila handles all the extra cast well, using smaller panels to focus on a few characters at a time to keep things from getting to muddled or confusing. And he draws a city that looks futuristic in a way that makes sense given its designer. The vertical garden is actually several stories underground and sustained with an artificial sun. Which is a good use of space, but maybe not as aesthetically charming as it could be. But aesthetics aren't something I would really expect Mr. Terrific to worry about.
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