1 out of 5

I guess I should be thankful that Milligan made it easy enough to know I won’t be buying this book.

It’s not so much that Pete has gotten worse as a writer over the years, it’s just that the weirdness isn’t as natural anymore.  Perhaps there are less drugs involved.  It’s possible that he’s better suited to more grounded material nowadays, as I quite enjoyed his Bronx Kill noir, but we don’t often see his name on those types of books; rather, he’s on superhero stuff.  And why I can’t say the writing isn’t necessarily up to some golden age snuff is that Pete’s always written with a very cheesy narrative voice (or way overly poetic in more dramatic cases), but the younger Mr. Milligan seemed to be game for constantly undercutting that melodrama with nonsense.  Nowadays, that ‘nonsense’ either comes across as rather obvious humor or forced wackiness (a la his Doop series, but we’ll wait ’til that first arc ends to weigh in).

I was excited to hear he’d be working on a creator-owned book that wasn’t leashed to an existing universe… it’s been a while, methinks, so maybe we’d see a new wave of Milligan material that harkened back to the sharper voice of yore.  He’s got a Vertigo title coming up, so we’ll see, but ‘Terminal Hero’ definitely isn’t the book for harkening in that wave.

It’s super strange how badly this was written.  I suspect Millie’s trying to rush us to some dramatics that take place after the setup – which has our lead character taking an experimental drug to cure his cancer which in turn unleashes ‘bad’ superpowers – but there are a handful of more polished ways of doing that than just cramming every origin stereotype into as few pages as possible, and then not taking the time to script realistic responses to the crazy behaviors we’re witnessing.  Oh, your head’s on fire; stay for a cup of tea?  Maybe I’m just missing the humor, but Pete’s back matter explanation of the title as a serious exploration of powers gone awry makes me think not.  And I guess artist Piotr Kowalski is trying a cleaner inking style than I’d seen him use previously… but unfortunately, this just makes most panels look hurried and over-simplified, not the look you’d want for a first issue.

Seriously.  This was pushing it.