Time Breakers

Rachel Pollack and Chris Weston

★★★★☆

I don’t know how I missed a time-travel comic book published by DC (through its short-lived Helix imprint) when it was new, but apparently I did. And I didn’t stumble on it over the next ~30 years until I read about the crowd-funded hardcover re-release last year.

A woman in futuristic tactical gear and wielding a dial-shaped device in one hand is running (or possibly jumping) toward the viewer, pulling a man in a sweater and jeans (with a long necklace of beads) with a shocked expression on his face. Behind them, gears scatter from a shattered clock face which holds images of other people: A frightened man clutching a book. A woman wearing a space suit or hazmat suit, holding her helmet in one arm. An angry monk. A man wearing dark round glasses sipping tea with one hand and holding the saucer in the other. And a man dressed for a safari, reeling with his arms out as if he's been struck or shot from behind.Time Breakers flips the familiar time-cop trope on its head: Instead of protecting time from paradoxes, the protagonists are trying to create more paradoxes, convinced that the very existence of life depends on it.

The main characters are intriguing, as are the ever-more-convoluted tangles of timeline dependency loops, but the villains don’t have much in the way of depth, and I can barely remember them even after a second read.

Weston’s art is detailed, bringing to life the settings and costumes of different eras ranging from prehistory to the near future.

The story feels a bit choppy and unbalanced, spending more time on setup than I’d expect from something this length, and diving into the resolution faster than expected. It makes me wonder if it was originally intended to be a longer story, or an ongoing series that would allow more room for characters, and then shortened to 5 issues.

The 2024 hardcover collection includes a new cover and commentary by Weston, along with two earlier commentaries by Pollack (who died the year before, and to whose memory this edition is dedicated) from 1997 and 2017.

Regarding Helix Comics

Helix was a science fiction imprint that DC used for a couple of years in the mid-to-late 1990s. Its best-known title, Transmetropolitan (a futuristic take on Hunter S. Thompson by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson), moved over to Vertigo after the label was retired.

I only remember picking up a couple of them at the time: Sheva’s War because of its painted artwork, and The Dome: Ground Zero for its early computer-generated art. A few years later when I finished reading the main Elric books I picked up the collection of Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, and I eventually got around to reading most of Transmet. One of these days I’ll read the rest of it. There were more, of course, but Cyberella is the only other title that rang a bell when I read that list.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I skipped most of the Helix line. I was reading a lot of comics (mostly super-heroes, but some media tie-ins), and I was reading a lot of science-fiction books, and I was obviously aware of Helix…so why didn’t I check out more of the science-fiction comics? I can only assume that most of them just didn’t grab my attention enough to look more closely. Even the one about time paradoxes.

More info at Time Breakers.