By Scott Duvall, Ralf Singh, Nic Chapuis, and Taylor Esposito
“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.” – H.G. Wells
That’s some solid advice by Herbert, a man who wrote all of the books…all of them. Ever read a book? Herbert wrote that book. He also wrote The Time Machine, a book that has a big impact on this particular story.
Scott Duvall brings us to a world of the future in Narcopolis: Continuum #1. A world where time travel is becoming a reality, but should we really be playing with time? I think someone should have slept on their decision to do some dimensional traveling. This story sets up the common tropes seen in time travel stories, even giving us the “Where am I…when am I?” line. We all love that line right?
Something Duvall does well is craft his main character, Ben, a solid motive – to find out what happened to his dad! But we’re also given a glimpse that this particular motive could have some pretty big consequences. Is he really up for it?
On the artwork side of this issue is Ralf Singh on the line work along with Nic Chapuis on colors. A page they do well together comes when we get the opening scene to where Ben works. He’s working in an urban area reminiscent of NYC where the buildings are grey and black with illuminating billboards lining the sides of skyscrapers. Apparently flying cars aren’t a thing yet, but everyone is still taking the train, so our transportation infrastructure in the future is still pretty good. All of the billboards, however, call attention to one thing – Ambro. Ambro is where Ben works and it’s monopolized the drug industry. When it comes to inside the building where Ben works, a lot of the color is drained away and replaced with blue, although it returns in a pretty cool way when he travels for the first time. Upon arriving back, we get a great line from Ben involving what the future is like; “I…I went to…the future…there were these ape-like creatures…lived underground…ate people…it was horrible…”. Eva instantly calls him out on this…but could you imagine? What would that be like? A planet of apes? They should make a movie about that and put James Franco in it just because.
Duvall presents a solid start to what looks like will be a suspenseful story. Singh and Chapuis work well together in their interpretation of the future as they help to craft a character that is stuck in the past.
Narcopolis: Continuum is out December 30th from Heavy Metal
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