Out of Time sees a day in the life of employees at a nameless company that facilitates people’s relocation to various points in time to begin new lives, while fixing the problems caused by the few who break the rules of non-interference established as safeguards. “We are still suffering from the repercussions of when we let people fiddle with things”, cynical time traveller Redmond declares against a backdrop of the Bayeux Tapestry looking like a horizontal Facebook timeline.
As new girl Lizzie is shown the ropes by Redmond we are introduced to a bizarre set of people and a surreal world is haltingly revealed, her presence facilitating a series of vignettes that takes us through the incongruous everyday of futuristic life. Imagine the crew of Red Dwarf starring in a 2000AD Future Shock and you’ll be some of the way there. Non-sequiturs punctuate the story, launching off onto a brief tangent before jumping back just as abruptly, but somehow everything fits together in a bizarre yet compelling sequence of the advanced as the everyday.
The artwork matches the surreal free-association, almost abstract in its disregard for stylistic conventions. The characters are blocky, thick and basic, and each panel is coloured by a single splash, be it blue, orange, pink, yellow, brown, green or purple. The dialogue is kind of the same, constructed of run-on streams of almost punctuation-free speech that at times gets a little frustrating. Off-kilter but still functioning by its own internal logic, Out of Time is brief and surreal, but distinct enough to warrant checking out.
OUT OF TIME / WRITER: LUKE JAMES HALSALL / ARTIST: CUTTLEFISH / PUBLISHER: OBSCURE REFERENCE COMICS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
