Terror Inc is a horrible comic book. It also sold pretty terribly, with Marvel no doubt helping that a seasonal special might boost the sales a little. In the end all it really did was increase the number of nightmares that naïve young comic buyers had about a seven-foot tall monstrous Santa with green skin and whiskers stalking them through a darkened warehouse on Christmas Eve. In case you were wondering, the early nineties are the exact moment in time comic books stopped being for kids, and began to pitch themselves to sociopathic loners who would otherwise be cleaning guns in their Unabomber cabin in the woods. The basic premise of the series centred on a mystical, gross hitman who grafted people's limbs onto his body and thus gained all the skills that person had in life. Yeah, it was kind of disgusting and hyper-violent and there's a reason it only sold to those Unabomber types. Weirdly the Christmas special ended up kind schmaltzy, despite being sold with a cover that bore a couple of criminals cornered by a man in a red suit and the legend YOU BETTER NOT SHOUT, YOU BETTER NOT POUT, YOU BETTER NOT CRY, GET READY TO DIE... Yeah, this isn't your pappy's wussy Christmas story! Turns out the man in the red coat is Terror himself, who has swiped the costume from a Salvation Army collector, which leads to a hilarious case of mistaken identity! Because he's been hired by a mafia don, who gave up his right hand so that Terror could pat his son on the head one last time, and the poor little so-and-so thinks this monster is Jolly Old Saint Nick.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
