“Retroactive continuity,” or Retcon, is a new series coming out from Image with writer Matt Nixon pairing alongside Toby Cypress. Time travel and saving the world again? This series is technically a redo of a series that never was — I’m a bit confused myself, but I’m willing to give it a try. There’s a crew of maybe-military personnel with exceptional “abilities” working to save the world’s timeline. Issue #1 has them facing cover-ups and dodging the enemy. Is it good?
So, after reading the Image summary of this series I was really expecting something a bit different for the first issue — for the whole idea, really. They offer the idea of a parallel Earth and time travel/timeline issues but I really didn’t see any information regarding that in the first issue. There’s no quick intro or backstory page to help you figure out what’s going on so you really need to do a bit of research, and even that didn’t help much. So, my take on the story so far is more of a paranormal reconnaissance team. They’re trying to cover up or protect a past that gave certain people certain gifts. If I go about it like that the first section of the issue is actually pretty interesting, albeit confusing. I think Nixon meant for it to be a bit odd anyway so it works if that was his goal. He’s got a few pretty intriguing characters: Skinwalker is one to watch from what I can tell. Your main guy, Ross, is the “good guy” who is trying to more or less help the people his crew is targeting.
The pages aren’t necessarily the best when it comes to definition or color but I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re going for here. It’s very odd and confusing, but then again as is the entire issue, so it fits. There’s a blonde in the beginning that’s probably the best drawn and illustrated character out of the lot and she’s not technically part of the main group. I guess you could say she was possessed.
I can’t say that I like this. I also can’t say I hate it because it’s just so difficult to decide what’s going on. I think that in the long run the series may do really well for a certain type of audience. It requires lots of hope that something will happen that will make sense. I think Nixon and Cypress have something here — I’m just waiting to see what.
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