Comic Review: Time Before Time #1

Time Before Time #1

Image Comics

Writers: Declan Shalvey & Rory McConville

Artists: Joe Palmer & Chris O’Halloran

Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

This week Image Comics released a new bold approach to the time-traveling genre. Written by both Declan Shalvey and Rory McConville, Time Before Time brings a Looper kind of story to comics.

The comic starts off with our protagonist, Tatsuo, in 1987 introducing a mother and her son to their new life. It is obvious that Tatsuo has done this before as he gives the family the basics of the time period and is not bothered by any of the commotion it triggers. Tatsuo then travels back to his time, 2140, when he’s received by another colleague that works for the Syndicate, a criminal organization that offers the time-traveling service for people that need to getaway. Upon the main character’s return, we learn that he’s about to close his ledger with the Syndicate meaning he’d be free. The organization, however, fakes a time pod breakage in order to be able to add it to Tat’s debt. The protagonist then plots a plan with his friend, Oscar, to steal a pod and time travel away from this cycle.

The introduction to this series is pretty good. Shalvey and McConville do an excellent job of setting up Tatsuo’s motivation and escalating it until the twist to his and Oscar’s plan near the end of the chapter. This changes the plan less than what happens even later in this issue, but it helps to make Tatsuo’s motivation for stealing from a time-traveling mob even more relatable. The character is very charismatic well. We get to know him mostly through his attempts of convincing Oscar to join him in his escapade which is given to us, readers, in a montage across three panels in a page that contains a whole year. It’s an incredibly well-paced and captivating first issue that sets up the protagonist and the next chapter greatly.

I like Joe Palmer’s artwork for this chapter a lot. It takes a more simplistic approach to faces but manages to convey the characters’ feelings well with the facial expressions present. It reminds me a lot of Gabriel Bá’s work on Umbrella Academy, though in Time Before Time people are not as cartoonish as in UA.

The colors are done by O’Halloran and they certainly get the job done. It was expected to have a contrast between paler color tones in the 2140 polluted future and brighter colors in the past, indicating our natural atmosphere has become that of smoke. The lights and shades share this trait. There is rarely more than one color tone for an element in the panel which shares the space with a hard black shade. I liked this approach since it gives off a noir feel to the comic, which I feel was the intent for this series.

Responsible for lettering is Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou who puts on a show. There is a rich array of sound effects decorated to give just the right feel to them. For instance, a keypad having different colored ‘Deet’ sounds made me feel that slight difference in the sound for each key. I also liked the overlapping bubbles which are great to portray a character interrupting the other.

Time Before Time is off to a good start. The Looper like “crime controls time travel” approach is a bit risky, in my opinion, since it was the source for some plot holes in that movie. In any case, this series will probably go a very different direction that should resolve this problem. This makes me excited for the next chapter. It’s an easy recommendation to any time travel fan out there.