Little changes in over a million years.
Creative Staff:
Story: Matt Kindt
Art: Scott Kolins
What They Say:
2015: the distant past. A crash landing strands five deep-time explorers in a primitive world of internal-combustion engines and Internet 1.0 and tears a rift in space-time that spouts dinosaurs, giant robots, and other strange phenomena! Only the marooned “Past Aways” can defend the twenty-first century, unless the tensions of their unexpectedly prolonged mission tear them apart!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having come across a couple of Matt Kindt’s works in the last year or two and enjoying them for the most part, a chance to take a look at another series was certainly an easy choice to make, especially since it involves time travel. When it come to new original works, there’s always a barrier to entry in a way that some authors handle better than others. Trying to present enough of the core story ideas and hooks into the first issue to make you want to come back for more is hard without actually spoiling where it is you want to go if you’ve got a long term plan mapped out. What helps from time to time, especially with the way books are structured these days, is that you can do a little text lead-up on the opening page to set the tone, which this one does well in filling us in on what happened a little bit prior to the start of the actual books.
That little bit fills us in on at least a little of the basics, telling us about this team of deep-time explorers that ended up lost on their travels backwards by going 1.2 million years, ending up in the Hawaiian rain forests. That definitely puts you into an interesting frame of mind as you meet the various people from there that are now stuck in the 21st century and you realize that they’re no different overall, just their technology is advanced. Of course, you don’t know what future-history has in store and how mankind will have changed, but the only really off-putting part of the book is that outside of a minor quirk or two, the team could largely feel like they’re from the 21st century all around. Of course, the book takes place a year after they’ve been here and going about their work, but even still it just feels like they aren’t as sufficiently “alien” as they should be considering the situation.
What we get is the team scattered around the world going through their own issues, some of them suicidal, some of them with real problems with others they’ve worked with, but all dealing with the same thing. Because they’re people out of time, they can’t die in the present and that has some amusing ways in how the universe works to keep them alive. But the thing they’ve been waiting for has happened as a dragon-like creature has shown up in Athens, causing trouble and killing people, with them realizing that it’s a creature not from this time. That opens up the potential that their work can be sent back home and that they themselves may have a way of getting back home as well. So the focus becomes on introducing each of the characters and where they are, and the kinds of ways they’ve adapted to this world, and the push to bring them together in order to get the mission underway again.
This opening issue plays as you’d expect because of it as we do get one of the characters providing narration for the book as a whole and it decently introduces most of them across a couple of pages each, some of them getting a bit more such as the team lead named Art and his apparent teammate and nemesis Phil as the two have real issues. The array of things they’re up to paints them as very human as they’ve tried to adapt and we see the intriguing aspects of the thing from out of time that’s causing problems, and how the media reacts to it. Kindt lucks out in working with Scott Kolins on the artwork here as he makes everything distinctive and you don’t run into an issue where some characters are too similar to each other. He also gets to have a lot of fun in designing an undersea base that’s fallen into disrepair, the general future-tech design work that’s definitely interesting, and various locales in general from Arizona to Los Angeles to Athens. There’s a good sense of things here as it starts to pull everything together and the combination of Kindt and Kolins looks like it has a lot of potential.
In Summary:
Being the sucker for time travel stories as I am, it’s no surprise that I found myself intrigued by this. There are naturally issues that crop up in my mind in how it should work, but that just leaves me wanting to get answers about the future side of the story and what their world is like, and how it’s shaped them. Starting off with the team fractured and apart is not unusual at all and it works well enough for obvious reasons of introducing everyone and their various issues, so there’s no complaints there. There’s just enough intrigue here to entice and I’m definitely curious to see where they’re going to go with this, though I hope we get more concrete things sooner rather than later as a tease in time travel material can last only so long. And new creator owned series definitely need strong hooks from the start. This one comes close to a strong hook, but needs just a bit more to really cement it. I’m definitely in for it though.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 25th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
