The Infinite Loop #1

by Pierrick Colinet & Elsa Charretier

When it comes to comics, you never have to look far to find a story involving time travel. However, most of those stories never really touch on the effect messing with the time stream can have on history. Sure, some stories use a disrupted timestream as a foothold to jump into an otherworld-type story, but not many tackle the consequences of screwing with time or how to repair it. The Infinite Loop is a series that not only focuses on time travel, but how little human beings really do change over time.

Teddy’s job is to fix these time anomalies and make sure to uphold time’s endless loop. The name “Infinite Loop” refers to the constant cycle Teddy and her partner Ulysses work to maintain, which can be difficult when you have to watch humanity make the same mistakes over and over again. This has worn on Teddy after many time jumps and this issue picks up there. Pierrick Colinet writes a pretty deep first issue that hits the ground running. Readers are thrust into The Infinite Loop without much exposition. That can be a little jarring and make it a little harder for some readers to engross themselves into the story. Yet, Colinet writes some pretty fun dialog and uses the time travel premise to touch on more sensitive subjects like human society, relationships and true happiness. Infinite Loop is more than a time traveling adventure, it also has something more to say.

Elsa Charretier’s art style in Infinite Loop has a simplistic but carefree approach. This gives The Infinite Loop a lighthearted tone to balance out some of the serious story points. Charretier also has some really interesting ideas on how to enhance the storytelling through her art in The Infinite Loop. There are many instances in this issue alone where she labels things in the panels for readers to keep the pace. One stand out page that utilizes this is the page showing “How to Escape from a T-Rex”. She not only does this for storytelling purposes, but also to reflect emotion. One panel that stood out was when Ulysses has a moment of somber reflection and the whole panel is black and white except the smaller panel around his head. Time travel stories can be an awful lot of fun to read. However, an assortment of different characters and period settings can be rough for some artists.The Infinite Loop slightly suffers here in that most of these times Teddy jumps to aren’t easy to distinguish. Luckily they label the period in the panel every time they do time jump, but it is a very small gripe to a gorgeous looking book.

The Infinite Loop is one of those series that will crack any preconceived notion of what you might expect from its story. A new series from relatively unknown creators are like a mystery box that you should open with an open mind. This was a decent start for The Infinite Loop with some bumpy moments, but was overall a sincere debut to what may end up being the unique series that it will blossom into.