A comiXologist Recommends:
Mike Isenberg recommends The Bunker #4
I love a good time-travel story. Unravelling paradoxes and reversing the expected order of cause and effect means that time-travel stories have the potential for some incredibly suspenseful and clever storytelling. But “clever” can only get a story so far; from Back to the Future to Lost, the best time-travel stories are only ever as good as their characters.
The Bunker (by Joshua Hale Fialkov (joshfialkov) and Joe Infurnari (joeinfurnari) is a time-travel story that is absolutely rooted in its characters. It features a small ensemble of five friends who begin issue #1 spending their final post-college summer together by heading out to the woods to bury a time capsule. When they break ground on their chosen spot, however, they discover their names stenciled onto the buried hatch of an underground bunker.
Like the time capsule the characters had intended to bury, the bunker is full of pictures, letters, records and memories from the time that the bunker was filled. And like the time capsule, all of these things seem to be from the characters themselves. But none of it is from the past; everything in the bunker is from decades in the future.
The letters the characters find are addressed to them from their future selves, and are full of shocking revelations. Some of these are mind-blowing: “You’re going to be president” and “You’re going to cause an apocalypse.” But, importantly, many are smaller and personal: “Your boyfriend is cheating on you.”
The commitment to the characters, their inner lives, their relationships, and their conflicts, is the glue that holds the book together, and it’s what makes the big-picture end-of-the-world part of the story matter at all to me as a reader. And boy, does it matter. I’m absolutely glued to my seat, waiting for the next issue to come out. If you have any interest at all in character-based sci-fi and time-travel stories, I can definitely recommend picking up this book.
For fans of: time travel, dystopia, action, suspense
Mike Isenberg is an Associate Production Coordinator at comiXology, and the co-writer of First Law Of Mad Science. He lives in Harlem with his cats, Tesla and Edison
A comiXologist Recommends:
Eric Rosenfield recommends MediaEntity #06
One of the great things about digital comics is that it gives access to works deserving of a larger audience, including works from outside the United States. MediaEntity is originally a French webcomic now available in both English and French on comiXology. Like Thrillbent, MediaEntity is created specifically for the digital medium and takes full advantage of the elliptical, filmic effects of comiXology’s Guided View Native format.
The story is about a man who is framed for making an outrageous stock trade that ruins the large financial conglomerate he works for to the tune of billions of dollars. On the run from the law, he seeks to unravel the mystery of who framed him, and encounters an underground world of shadow economies and people on the fringes of society, including a homeless man with a magical affinity for pigeons. In this latest installment, our hero has found himself kidnapped to a trailer park full of people who know more than they’re letting on, led by their mysterious ‘guide’ Camille. Meanwhile, a newspaper man desperate for a lead witnessed his abduction and thinks he can find out where he is. Somewhere between a taught crime-thriller and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, MediaEntity is a Guided View Native exploration of what digital comics are capable of.
[Pick up MediaEntity #06 here!]
Eric Rosenfield is an associate product manager at comiXology and has worked there since digital comics were read on tin cans and string.