Review – Zoe: Out Of Time #1 and #2

One of the highlights of running this tiny ship called the Comics Herald, is getting to review comics that I would never have potentially stumbled across otherwise. One such example is Zoe: Out Of Time. 

Written by J. Michalski and Alexander Lagos, with Derlis Santacruz on art duties and Oren Kramek on colours, on the face of it this is a boy meets girl time-travel story. And that’s exactly what it is, but it’s done in a fresh enough way to make it a fun read. Zoe is living in the year 2050 and is obsessed with a band from the 1990s and thanks to having a scientist dad who happens to have worked out how to travel in time, she heads back to 1990. It takes all of Issue #1 to set that up but it’s done in an entertaining enough way that it doesn’t make the story feel like it is waiting to start. In fact, I probably enjoyed Issue #1 more than #2 as once Zoe arrives in 1990, things get a little bit formulaic there for a while but the pace picks up toward the end.

The art is engaging and actually reminded me quite a bit of The Second Life of Dr Mirage, though on checking back on my issues of that the comparison isn’t totally valid. If I had to make a criticism of the colouring, it’s the heavy reliance of one-colour backgrounds that dominate a page or series of panels. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need for particular settings, but to me it seemed to dominate the whole book.

Find out more about Zoe: Out of Time over at their website.