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.

 [Pick up The Bunker #4 here!]

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}