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Frank Miller is easily one of the top names in comic books, with a career spanning over 40 years across comics and film. He’s best known for his gritty art and writing style, which can be seen across miniseries like “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Sin City” (both later adapted for the silver screen). But something you may not know about Miller is that he wrote the screenplays for both “Robocop 2” and “Robocop 3” films.
With this intimate knowledge of the franchise, Miller leaned on his miniseries chops and wrote four crossover comics for Dark Horse called “RoboCop Versus The Terminator,” and it offers cut details from both of his Robocop screenplays, resulting in a lore-filled adventure that explores both franchises in a respectable manner (it was the 90s after all), that of course results in some time travel shenanigans to close things out.
That’s right: to defeat Skynet and prevent the destruction of mankind, Robocop had to travel back in time (a familiar Terminator plot point) to destroy it in its infancy, as a spy satellite. This cleanly wraps up the four-issue miniseries, and if you find yourself hungry for more “RoboCop Versus The Terminator,” there’s also a video game that goes by the same name that follows some of the comic’s plot points. It launched a year after the book, thus providing a slightly different twist on the story in an interactive form. At the end of the day, Robocop beats the Terminators along with Skynet in both the comic and video game, because of course he does, he is the good guy after all.
The good guy wins, but with great sacrifice
No matter which film you watch, or comic you read, or video game you play, Robocop is fundamentally a good guy. He starts off as a by-the-book cop, and winds up a by-the-book super cop thanks to his mostly robotic body. While there is some ambiguity as to how Robocop learns to ignore an erroneous Prime Directive, going against a hidden clause that forbids the arrest of senior OCP officers. Robocop is primarily portrayed as a stoic figure, and the “RoboCop Versus The Terminator” miniseries doesn’t stray too far from this role despite its over-the-top story.
Essentially, Robocop uncovers that the very technology used to create his body will also result in the birth of Skynet. After a failed assassination attempt, Robocop sets out on a journey to destroy Skynet and its Terminators, resulting in the destruction of his body, eventually replaced with a Terminator skeleton. As outlandish as this sounds, it’s a great way to tie both universes together. Plus, Robocop gets the ability to create an army of Robocop Terminators to take on the baddies.
Ultimately, self-sacrifice is needed to save the world. Like any good superhero story, Robocop travels back in time in his Terminator form in order to fly into space and sacrifice himself by destroying Skynet’s spy satellite as his last programmed command. With Skynet obliterated, the Terminator version of Robocop blinks out of existence, essentially erasing the Terminator/Robocop timeline the story takes place in. Robocop end up back in his normal timeline, continuing his regular adventures of cleaning up Detroit’s streets.
