Sometimes time travel takes you… elsewhere.
Creative Staff:
Story: Rafael Albuquerque, Mike Johnson
Art: Rafael Albuquerque
What They Say:
Welcome to the Meld, an inhospitable dimension in time where Joshua, a chrononaut, finds himself trapped. With no memory or feedback from the team of scientists that sent him, he can’t count on anything but his heart and a stranger’s voice to guide him to his destiny.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I admit it, I’m a sucker for time travel stories. There’s so many ways it can go, even when using familiar angles to work with, that it can lead to some really interesting stories and character material. Dark Horse kicks off a new miniseries involving it here with Ei8ht, which comes from writer/artist Rafael Albuquerque and co-writer Mike Johnson. It’s my first experience with either of them so there’s a freshness about it that definitely works for me since I’m not thinking of any other works they did. With this being a miniseries, there’s only so much space to work with, but I like that the first issue teases just enough of what’s going on to draw you in, but doesn’t lay everything out. You get the confusion of the main character, but some of the background as well, just not all of it. It provides a dual track of material to work towards in understanding what’s really going on here.
The story here has a man named Joshua, working with some scientist in what seems like the present, getting ready to go on a mission to the past to do something with a Nazi, presumably to kill him. Joshua’s riding some cutting edge technology both in the time travel device and the ability to communicate with the present and he’s doing what he can to ensure that he remembers his mission when he gets there as apparently memory loss is a potential problem along the way with such a trip. There are deals being made about what will happen if Joshua completes his mission and it involves a woman in some way, again there’s enough to presume that it’s because of medical reasons that he’ll go the distance to get the most advanced help he can get for her, and it works well to set the stage for motivations both for Joshua and what the scientist may be up to with all of this, and that there’s a certain kind of trust going on here that can be verified fully. That gives it all a nice tension and shows us that the two men are working together, but they’re not a tight bond like other properties we’ve seen.
Joshua’s time in what you presume to be the past is really well done as we get him struggling with the crash of the ship, the memory loss and just the weirdness of it all – such as being told to follow the dinosaur over the communication device. The blending of the two time periods works well throughout the book, especially the panic in the beginning with Joshua trying to remember his name and then the calmness from before the journey. The journey is one that takes him to unusual but almost expected places as we see him run up against a group of people that feel like they stepped out of the Road Warrior and he ends up being kept in their camp after being knocked out. Information is minimal, but we learn that this place is called the Meld, which is like a bartertown of sorts that definitely gives off a post-apocalyptic feeling. Add in a couple of panels of our mystery man, who is known as the Spear in this place, and it sets up a lot of things without giving us anything firm. Which is exactly what it should do.
In Summary:
Admittedly, there’s nothing here that stands out as plainly unique and never been done before in a way, but what Ei8ht presents is a very well polished work that offers up a lot of potential. The team here has put together a really solid work that makes me want to know more about both periods of time in it, to see why Joshua will go the distance here but also to see how things unfold in this other place – which is easy to believe is the past but also something very different. Adding in the man that he’s after and what his story is and how it all ties together has me more interested in the next issue than I would have guessed at the start. The scripting is solid and the pacing is spot on, but what really sells it in the end as a whole is the visual design. Albuquerque does a great job in giving us a bleak world in all the time periods, but he also gives us the color coding right from the start. It also helps that he does the color work here which helps to really make it clear how everything is going to fit and flow here while adding to the narrative in a great way, especially some of how the Meld locations look in contrast to the character designs in it. The Meld is its own thing, and the idea of traveling to the past but ending up there is intriguing. I can’t wait for more of this miniseries. The potential is definitely here, but you have to really absorb all the elements of it, not just the story, not just the art, but the two and the coloring of it all.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: February 18th, 2015
MSRP: $3.50
