Chrononauts issue one
Mark Millar’s latest offering already has movie deals being linked to it, and it is easy to see why. The success of his stories being adapted to screen with Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service gives a creative pedigree studios are seeking, but right from the first page Chrononauts feels that it is made for the screen.
Starting with an F-14 Tomcat plane from the seventies being found inside a several thousand year old temple, it proves to Dr Corbin Quinn that the time travel technology he has been working on will succeed. In an opening that could easily have been the first twenty minutes of an eighties classic sci-fi adventure movie, the excitement builds to the human test of the technology.
Doctor Quinn, whose focus on his work has already cost his marriage, is joined in his adventures by time travelling buddy Doctor Danny Reilly, a more carefree lovable rogue. The experiment is overseen by a global audience, televised like a classic NASA rocket launches for the whole world to see, when inevitably something goes wrong.
Stepping through a device somewhere between a Stargate and the Time Tunnel, Quinn is knocked off course into a different time period. Risking all to save his friend Reilly leaps through time to try and save him. Will he succeed? The last page of issue one practically screamed for a radio announcer saying “Join us in the next exciting episode of…”
Chrononauts comes hot off the heels of Mark Millar’s Starlight (also rumoured to be undern negotiation to be brought to the screen as a series) which revisited an older Flash Gordon-esque character being taken back to the alien world he had once saved, and it seems as though Millar is trawling through the stories and comics of our youth and bringing them back to a modern world with his usual flair.
The artwork by Sean Gordon Murphy (Hellblazer: City of Angels, Punk Rock Jesus) is stunning, and continues the feel of a tribute to classic sci-fi. Variant cover artwork for upcoming issues even feature a Back to the Future variant (issue three). The comic has a great sense of adventure and humour, and for lovers of classic sci-fi adventure it is definitely one to put on the pull list.
