On this week’s edition of The Goggler Pull List, we’re bringing to you two first issues that we recently picked up on our latest *adventure to our local comic book store. Both these books are now on our pull lists because they set up the tone and the challenges facing the protagonists really well. This isn’t the pilot episode of a TV series. These first issues are the first arcs of the pilot. That’s the bit that sells you on the show before that first ad break.
* Due to lockdown we’re not getting out much so even the most mundane trip out feels like an adventure or a heist.
Time Before Time (Declan Shelvey, Rory McConville, Joe Palmer)
The first issue of this comic quickly introduces the reader to the idea of time travel. The impression here is that it’s nothing special, but possibly highly illegal, or controlled. It isn’t as mundane as an international flight, but a little bit more like crossing borders illegally with a Mexican coyote. You’d need to know a guy, and it’ll probably cost you all your life savings, and is dangerous as hell.
Tatsuo is one of these coyotes. Maybe. Tatsuo is with The Syndicate and he ferries people (to the past), while also ferrying contraband (from the future). It’s 2140 and Tatsuo is getting sick (both literally and figuratively) of working off his indentured debt to The Syndicate and wants to bust out.
Time Before Time feels like a time travel story you’re familiar with, but does more than enough to move things around to keep you interested and coming back for more.
Eve (Victor LaValle, Jo Mi-Gyeong, Brittany Peer)
Eve opens with a somewhat serene sequence. Eve is sitting in the trees, observing mangrove crabs as they climb up to escape the rising tide. She’s talking to her dad over her walkie, back in the bunker/lab they live in. As she walks through the lush jungle, we listen in on Eve as she talks to herself out loud, making her way over wooden suspended bridges, climbs up higher atop the trees, until she gets to the entrance of the bunker. She waltzes in like she’s done so a million times in her young life.
And this is where things take a bit of a turn.
Eve is a story about a little girl of about 11 years old who starts to find out that the world she recognises and loves may not actually be the real world that she’s in. There’s a talking teddy bear that may or may not be there, and a dangerous mission to be accomplished. The comic ends with a literal call to adventure that really drives your focus towards the next issue. Victor LaValle’s main character is not only a young girl, but a girl that doesn’t know this world, and will need to overcome it in order to fulfill her mission. There’s character in every single one of Jo Mi-Gyeong’s panels, and although most of the comic takes place in a bunker, Brittany Peer’s colour in the final panel, as Eve and her teddy bear watch the sunrise is beautiful.
There’s is definitely more here that we’re interested to read about. Is it Kirkman’s The Walking Dead? Or more like Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man? What does the world of Eve look like? We don’t know, but we sure as hell want to find out.
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