Review: 40 Seconds
One wakes up from a strange dream. His left shoulder hurts...
Two greets him in the common room, watching a video message from her wife and daughter. Last message before the mission...
Three is cooking noodles. He offers some to Four but she doesn't want to spoil her strict fitness regime. She also had weird dreams...
Final briefing:
"Four years ago we received a beacon - a distress signal. It's origin, some four million light years from Earth. Within that beacon were schematics for forge gate technology."
The team has a mission: to travel through the forge gate, which will take them to a world over one million light years away. There, they will find another gate, and so on and so on until they reach Terminus.
They will not be the first team to venture through the gate. Mission Control lost contact with the previous travellers...
Time to go. The team approaches the gate and One places his hand on the activation panel. Light swirls around them.
It takes forty seconds for the gate to activate.
The swirling light dissipates and they are standing on an alien world. Trekking to the next gate, they come across an abandoned uniform which resembles one of their own. One of the first team?
Reaching the next gate, One activates it. The forty second countdown begins...
... and an arrow comes flying through the air, striking him in his left shoulder.
40 Seconds by writer Jeremy Haun and artist Christopher Mitten is an odd tale that strikes an unsettling note right from the very beginning. Our heroes set off on their quest, through a series of dream-like landscapes that threaten to flip into nightmare territory without warning. There is an air of not just mystery, but of the grip on reality itself slipping.
The artwork has a light touch with a Mœbius-like quality, enhanced by soft washes of colour that bleed gently through the panels. (Colours here are by Brett Weldele.) This creates a surreal effect like glowing mists enveloping the exotic worlds the travellers must cross, which adds to the hallucinatory atmosphere.
Each new vista is like a mirage, ready to dissolve when you get too close. Beautifully poetic? Or disconcertingly insubstantial?
With each step, with each new planet, the questions mount up.
And the questions are not just about what is out there...
Zak Webber
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