Schooling you in temporal mechanics and great writing!
Creative Staff:
Story: Fred Van Lente
Art: Clayton Henry
What They Say:
At this very moment in Geneva, Switzerland, history is being made. A thousand meters underground inside the Large Hadron Collider, researcher Neela Sethi is about to discover time travel – and jeopardize her life in the process. But she doesn’t know that yet. Ten minutes from now, every deadbeat chrononaut, wannabe conqueror, and misguided protector of the time stream will be banging down her door. Good thing that the legendary Ivar, Timewalker, got there first…right? Now it’s down to history’s most jaded, most tempestuous time traveler to stop the worst of everything that is, was, and will be…before time runs out!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
All right, class, today’s lecture covers Dr. Stephen Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture. Our guest lecturer will be Ivar, with Dr. Neela Sethi serving as his case model and assistant. Make sure you take copious notes, as he will be covering a great deal of theory as well as history of things yet to be. The title of this lecture, for those of you interested, is “Let’s Not Kill Hitler!”
Safe for the moment from the temporal assassins sent to kill her, Neela and Ivar take a romp through Adolph Hitler’s timeline to prove some points about time travel—namely, that history cannot be changed in significant ways (The Doctor would call these “fixed moments”)—which is why no time traveler has ever successfully killed Hitler. After all, if you had access to a time machine, wouldn’t that be at least in the top ten of what you wanted to do with it?
Unfortunately, while on their field trip, the two are accosted by an Anon-Lurker, a time traveler from a time when humans have merged into “various aggregate social networks” and use time travel the same way that trolls use the Internet. The Anon-Lurker steals Ivar’s tachyon compass, which is his only way of detecting the natural time anomalies he uses to travel through space and time. If they don’t find the compass in the next ninety minutes then they will be stuck in the early 20th century for the rest of their lives. That is if the Nazis don’t kill them first.
The first issue of Ivar, Timewalker was just about as perfect as it gets, and I’m happy to say that the quality of the writing and the art are just as top-notch in this issue. Van Lente creates a rich, exciting, amazing, and funny universe, tossing around huge ideas like they were candy while at the same time using real science as the basis for the craziness his characters experience. More importantly, we care about Ivar and Neela. Neela obvious serves as an audience surrogate, but she also stands as an equal protagonist with Ivar. In fact, she will prove to be the richer character because of the arc she will undergo, whereas Ivar will more than likely remain the same loveable rogue we met at the beginning. Quite simply, this is a comic that works on pretty much every level, threatening to become my new favorite Valiant title.
In Summary:
Ivar, Timewalker #2 does everything right. The characters, the adventure, and the worldbuilding all come together to make a comic that may well be one the smartest and most enjoyable titles on the shelf. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I urge you to give it a try and jump in at the ground level.
So endeth the lesson.
Grade: A+
Age Rating: T+
Released By: Valiant
Release Date: 18 February 2015
MSRP: $3.99
