X-Terminators #1 Review

Written by: Leah Williams
Art by: Carlos Gomez
Colors by: Bryan Valenza
Letters by: VC’s Travis Lanham
Cover art by: Federico Vincentini, Matt Milla
Cover price: $4.99
Release date: September 21, 2022

X-Terminators #1 takes Dazzler, Jubilee, and Boom-Boom out for ladies’ night after Dazzler breaks up with her no-good boyfriend. An evening of drinking, lots and lots of cursing, and music is just what the doctor ordered… until the vampires show up.

Is It Good?

X-Terminators #1 is a rough comic to get through. A third of the way through, the dialog alone makes the reading experience a struggle, but there are a few bright spots, so let’s chalk this one up to an acquired taste.

First, the art is excellent. Gomez and Valenza turn in a stellar array of visuals, from eye-catching character designs to explosive action. The panel layout is excellent, the scenes transition smoothly (except for one spot I’ll get to in a minute), and the action choreography is fun.
However, the writing is about as engaging and entertaining as somebody broadcasting nails scraping a chalkboard through a megaphone turned up to eleven.

The plot centers on Dazzler demanding a ladies’ night out with Dazzler and Boom-Boom after she catches her boyfriend with another woman. As the drinking and swearing and music and swearing and dancing and swearing progress, the ladies find themselves cornered and drugged (courtesy of tainted shots) by Dazzler’s ex-boyfriend whose secretly a vampire. The plan, if there is one, is to drug and capture the mutants for… something(?)

Suddenly and truly out of nowhere, Boom-Boom is fighting a pack of gill-men in an underground cave, Dazzler is running through a maze as she’s chased by strange beasts, and Jubilee is driving a monster truck over a potholed field as she’s chased by hooligans in other trucks. The transition makes no sense, has no explanation, and appears to have nothing to do with vampires.

Dazzler, Boom-Boom, and Jubilee are running for their lives in three different survival challenges that look like life-sized video games, but the obstacles, pain, and destruction are very real. This plot started to make sense until it no longer made sense, and there’s nothing to do but assume it will make sense in a future issue.

Plot nonsense is one issue, but the cherry on the nerve-grating cake is Williams’ insistence on writing every one of the protagonists as low-class, screechy, crude, trailer park trash. Dazzler, Jubilee, and Boom-Boom all sound the same, there’s no distinctiveness to their personalities, and the personality they share is about as relatable as a delinquent middle-schooler who regularly robs her infirm grandmother for beer money after getting expelled from school due to hallway fistfighting.

In short, the art is great, the protagonists belong and sound like parolees from a youth detention center, and the plot is ill-structured nonsense. Read at your peril.

About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.

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Final Thoughts:

X-Terminators #1 has bold art and kinetic action, but the plot makes no sense, and the heroes are written in the same voice as screechy, delinquent middle schoolers.