The Terrifics #19 Review and **SPOILERS**

Me Am Excited

Writer: Gene Luen Yang
Artist: Max Raynor
Colors: Stephen Downer
Letterer: Tom Napolitano
Cover: Dan Mora
Variant Cover: Arist Deyn
Assistant Editor: Dave Wielgosz
Editor: Paul Kaminski
Cover Price: $3.99
On Sale Date: August 28, 2019

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

Hey hey! I’ve been away! But now I’m back! And ready to attack! This review of The Terrifics #19, the first issue I’ve read in months.

Explain It!

I love Bizarro. I love the character and his whole stupid world as delineated in Silver Age Action Comics back-up stories. I’ve even enjoyed some, more recent takes on that backwards crystalline fellow. But I am here to suggest to the world at large that people should stop trying to write for Bizarro. Just stop. None of you do it correctly and it winds up over-complicating any story. The first rule of writing Biarro-speak is that it should not be written in such a way that makes reading it much more laborious. For instance: writing sound effects in reverse is not only confusing on the face of it—do sounds get heard in reverse on Htrae?—but it is needlessly difficult on the face of it. The reader fills in their own mental noise, the DFX are indicators that an action is taking place.

Another thing you see is writers over-thinking the dialogue. As per the Silver Age rules: Bizarros “do opposite of all Earthly things!” So speaking broadly, they hate the things we love (boobs) and love the things we hate (long lines.) Yet you often see writers going too far with it and making the dialogue super complicated, reversing both the subject and the predicate until the language is incomprehensible. And this brings us back to the first rule: don’t write Bizarros so that their dialogue is incomprehensible. If it can’t be easily understood, it will be ignored.

As you can do, if you like, to the latest issue of The Terrifics. It is primarily a Bizarro story, tied into Year of the Villain wherein the Bizarro Mr. Terrific, known as Mr. Terrible, develops the T-Glob, a kind of beaten up T-Sphere that thwarts crimes before they happen, This leaveds Bizarro #1 without purpose, so he uses a time machine bestowed to him by holographic Lex Luthor to try and stop the T-Glob. Every attempt is unsuccessful, and Mr. Terrible eventually teams up with Bizarro #1to form the Terribles, a bunch of Bizarro versions of the Terrifics, plus Bizarron #1, despite there already being a cooler band of villains named the Terribles that fought the Terrifics like six issues ago. See, this is why folks need to stop writing Bizarro stories immediately.

Bits and Pieces:

A fairly uninspired and inconsistent Bizarro story concludes in an uninspired and inconsistent way. Which is, incidentally, a consistent aspect of this story,

5/10

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