Author: Jess Fink
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!
Jess Finkenstein has a time travel machine so the first thing she does with it is go back to the past and make out with her younger self? I can't count how many kinds of creep that reflects, but the most important one, as another reviewer put it, is that it reflects a level of self-absorption and self-indulgence that actually requires a time travel machine to actually go back and properly appreciate.
The juvenile obsession with sex and even the puerile fart jokes could have been justified had the story actually gone somewhere, but there was no story. It was merely an author's sad attempt at self-medication through art. And the art really wasn't very good. It was, barely, passable for the most part, although there were some serious bugs in it. For example, on page 87, she's kissing a boyfriend, and he asks her why she kisses with her eyes open, yet the drawings depict her kissing with her eyes closed. It's only a small detail but it shows the same kind of sloppiness and lack of close attention to good story-telling with which the story itself is shot through to the core.
The "story" here merely takes the author's completely unexceptional past and tries to tart it up so that it looks cool, funny, and interesting. It fails dismally, although it's highly revealing of her psyche that she repeatedly makes out with her past selves which is not only incestuous in the worst possible way, it's borderline pedophilic on occasion.
This conceit (and I really mean conceit in this case) perhaps would not have been so bad if it had had something original or interesting to convey, but it fails on all counts with the cheapest cop-out of all: everything in the past made us who we are today so changing it is a bad idea. Clearly it's not a bad idea, because to argue otherwise is to argue that it was a good thing that over six million people died at the hands of the Nazi regime, that it was perfectly fine to burn women for no other reason than religious superstition, and we're fine with that. I'm not. Count me out. On a personal level, it's also to argue that we should all have been the cruel, mean, thoughtless, and careless people that we all were on occasion, and that's fine too. No, it's not!
I call bullshit on that one because the selfishness inherent in that line of thinking is truly staggering. It's all about us? No. Not a single one of those things is all about us. Every one of them is about what we did to others, and the author is arguing here that it's fine to leave it like that, no apology necessary, not even when we can honestly apologize by going back and fixing what we did wrong.
Even if you do confine it selfishly to yourself, then it's to argue that it's fine that some people have debilitating guilt and regrets over past actions. I don't buy that. The only reason we're forced to buy it is because we actually don't have time travel, but we recognize that it isn't fine. That's why there's a thriving industry for therapists, and while some of that is undoubtedly pure indulgence, a heck of a lot of it is performing a real and valuable service.
Of course you can argue that this would change us, then we wouldn't be who we are and perhaps we wouldn't feel any need to go back and fix things, but if we changed the bad things we did there would be no need to go back and fix them! Besides, the way these things are presented here is so simplistic and mindless as to be pathetic. Despite the fact that the author goes back and does change things, and does repeatedly and seriously mess with her time line (and the time lines of others, don't forget), there isn't one single consequence. Nothing changes in her present, which begs yet again the question: what was the point of all this? Was it merely to do the exact same thing that all the other clichéd time-travel stories do - that nothing changes and it's all for the best that it doesn't? Again, what's the point of that story?
The author acknowledges time-travel influences from other stories, which hopefully explains the rip-off of the dashed line and arrow logo from the Back to the Future movie trilogy which adorns the cover, but for all her worship of this genre, she fails to grasp that there really are some great time-travel stories with interesting things to tell and ways to tell them. She may well have loved those stories, but she's quite evidently learned nothing from them, which is what's truly sad here. The problem is that she doesn't worship them enough to grasp that she needs to do far better if she's going to try telling one of her own.
The final insult was the profligate employment of white space. No one wants a rigidly-regimented presentation in a comic book for goodness sakes, but I have to yet again express the wish that writers and publishers would consider trees when they design these things. It doesn't matter in ebooks, but in a print book which is what I read, every page which isn't filled with imagery is really a waste of a perfectly good tree. Naturally, you want to design your comic to be visually appealing (otherwise why go graphic!), so all I'm saying is, when you're having these cool and experimental ideas run through your imagination, ask yourself if it's worth destroying a beautiful tree for. If you think it is, then go for it, otherwise, please think again.
I cannot recommend this story at all; in fact, I actively dis-recommend it. And no, the jumpsuit isn't cool. It's degrading and demeaning to women. The assertion that 'we can fix it' evidently was ignored when it came to quality control in this story.
