RoboCop Versus The Terminator (comics)

RoboCop Versus The Terminator is a four-issue comic book crossover limited series published in 1992 by Dark Horse Comics. It was written by Frank Miller and drawn by Walt Simonson, and ran for four issues. A crossover between the RoboCop and Terminator franchises, the comic follows RoboCop as he works with a soldier from a Skynet-controlled future to prevent the machines from using him to achieve victory.

The 1993 video game RoboCop Versus The Terminator is based on this comic series.

Plot
As Skynet's machines exterminate the last of humanity, human soldier Florence "Flo" Langer infiltrates their systems and learns Skynet first became self-aware through contact with the cyborg RoboCop, using his human consciousness and ability to interface with machines to gain sentience and spark the nuclear war that leads to Skynet seizing control over Earth. Flo travels back in time to Detroit and kills RoboCop before he can awaken Skynet, which in this story is an orbital defense system, defeating the machines in the future. To prevent their downfall, the machines send three terminators to protect RoboCop, saving him and wounding Flo, ushering in a future where the machines kill all life on Earth and render it into fuel to continue their extermination in space. However, RoboCop realizes their motives and fights back to protect Flo, prompting the terminators to try and merge him with Skynet by force, but they are destroyed in a running battle with RoboCop, Flo, ED-209s, and Dr. Marie Lazarus from RoboCop 3.

Realizing the Skynet-controlled future is a result of him, RoboCop commits suicide, but the machines send two more terminators to ensure his survival by killing Flo and Marie, dismembering RoboCop, and connecting his conscious severed head to Skynet. RoboCop refuses to give in and copies his mind into Skynet's networks, where he is hunted for decades, replicating faster than he can be erased, until he finds a security flaw in a terminator factory and uses it to build himself a new and improved body.

With his new body, RoboCop intercepts and defeats a force of machines sent to kill the remaining humans. He meets Flo, who is alive but never discovered his role in Skynet's sentience in this timeline. When she witnesses him use a terminator factory for repairs, she asks why he would stop with one body; agreeing, RoboCop constructs even more copies of himself, forming a squadron of RoboCops tasked with defeating Skynet for good. RoboCop leads his squadron into Skynet's central cortex but is ensnared by hallucinations and illusions until he sees Flo being mortally wounded; enraged, he connects himself to the machines but commands them to die, defeating Skynet and saving humanity, albeit too late to save Flo, who dies in his arms. Determined to prevent this future from happening in the first place, RoboCop travels back in time, flies into space, and destroys Skynet before it can gain sentience, preventing the events of the comic from happening. In this future, Flo wakes up in a beautiful garden. RoboCop, satisfied, promptly fades from existence, as this version of him would have never existed without Skynet.

In the saved timeline, the existing RoboCop feels an unexplained sense of peace, and decides to return to Detroit Police Department headquarters for a rest. The comic ends as the machines attempt to send one last terminator back in time to kill RoboCop and secure Skynet's future, only for it to overshoot the human era immensely and land in the Mesozoic Era, where it is crushed by a dinosaur.

Themes
The contrast of man and machine is made at several points in the series. Several scenes are narrated from the viewpoint of the machines (little distinction is made between Skynet and the machines as a whole), which describe a lifeless Earth ("silent and cold and clean") in exultant terms and life ("all the buzzing, twittering, dripping, drooling things") with disgust, at one point monologuing how life "thought its mushy grey brains had conquered the planet" when in fact it was "its endless, sweating spawning. It spawned and spawned, spewing out new flesh faster than the old could die."

RoboCop has a similarly low opinion of his almost completely mechanical nature, seeing himself as "a few chunks of brain matter." His narration contrasts him with "the humans." He's suicidal, but unable to act upon it as his mechanical components' command program forces him to follow his directives to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law, much to his disgust of his thoughts being only partly his. He pursues these with disregard of his own well-being, forgoing the sleep that his human parts need. Both viewpoints' narration describes the nature of machinery in terms of cold, with RoboCop's referring to the command program as "the cold part of him." After he builds his future body his alienation from humanity, which increases further as he duplicates himself many times over and sees himself as a robotic copy of a human, is described as growing colder by the moment and visually indicated by the duplicate RoboCops lacking synthetic skin on their faces and instead bearing terminators' skeletal grins. When he has to coat himself in flesh to travel back at the time in the finale, he opts for a shapeless lump that he immediately discards and is described as cold inside and out, his humanity completely gone and only the command to destroy Skynet left.

Film adaptation
Plans for a Terminator vs Robocop film have been on and off in the works since 1990. Although no movie has yet to be made with the crossover, several video games and comic books have been released based on the idea.

Video game
A video game loosely based on the comic was released for the Mega Drive/Genesis, Master System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Gear, and the Game Boy. A platform game tie-in for the Nintendo Entertainment System was also produced, but was ultimately cancelled; the ROM for it has since been distributed online. The Genesis version was awarded "Bloodiest Game of 1993" by Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Collected editions
The four issues, including stiff cardboard inserts intended as pull-out cut-outs, were bound together with a new cover as an "exclusive" collection by Diamond Comics. This version is long out of print.

In February 2014, Dark Horse announced that two collected editions of the series would be released the following July: a standard hardcover edition, and a "gallery edition" reproducing the original art at full size.