Page 45 Review by Stephen and Jonathan
"How old did you say this was?"
"The temple? It predates Stongehenge by six thousand years. The oldest place of worship anywhere on the planet.
"But that's not the interesting part. It's what the megaliths have been built around that's causing all the excitement.
"You have to remember this predates metal tools, Doctor Quinn. This was before man even had pottery...
"I told you it was worth the trip."
As prologues go this one packs quite the punchline delivered by Sean Murphy to eye-stopping effect.
For what were those megaliths were built around, perched atop ornate columns inside that temple is a fully armed F-14 Tomcat: a fourth-generation, supersonic, twinjet, two-seat, variable-sweep wing fighter aircraft first introduced in 1974. And, funnily enough, one of those did go missing back in the 1970s.
How did it end up in South-East Turkey six thousand years before Stonehenge was built?
That mystery - along with the fleet of sports cars found under Mayan temples and other strange temporal anomalies - convinces Doctor Corbin that he's on the right track, that time-travel is possible, which is just as well because his prototype satellite equipped with a television camera is about to be bent through a time-stream tunnel to transmit 1863 AD live to a frankly astonished worldwide audience.
It's quite the success.
Do you think it would have your attention?
Good, because Corbin Quinn and Danny Reilly are planning their first manned mission in eighteen months time with their hi-tech - and indeed high-fashion - time suits. No point in travelling through time if you can't look suave whilst doing it.
That our intrepid duo intend to take man's bold first steps backwards through time, becoming the world's first chrononauts in the process, all whilst televised absolutely live to the watching billions, possibly suggests an element of foolhardiness that doesn't bode well for their smooth passage. Inevitably therefore, like in every good time travel yarn, something immediately goes awry, and with Corbin Quinn seemingly lost in time, there is of course only one man up to the task of trying to retrieve him...
Given that Danny Reilly seems like an egomaniacal jack-ass of the first order, again whilst raising our amusement value considerably, well, it doesn't suggest his rescue mission is going to be remotely straightforward. Indeed, a spectacular double-page spread leaves us absolutely no doubt as to where Danny immediately finds himself. Deep in the proverbial temporal doo-doo, that's where! The when is the siege of Kabul in Samarkand, 1504. Right slap bang in the absolute middle of it...
Once the extratemporal extrication of Quinn is achieved, the only question that remains is where, or indeed when, our chronally challenged chums are going to go next. You don't seriously think these two grandstanding galoots are just going to head straight home in time safely for tea do you?!! No, of course not, and once timeline tweaking temptation gets the better of them, the fun really starts in what is basically a wickedly daft buddy caper.
Superb art from Sean THE WAKE / PUNK ROCK JESUS Murphy as Millar continues his own personal Pokemon quest to collect all the best artists in the comic industry for his Millarworld imprint before he expires. Fair play to him in that respect for it'd be very easy to stick with a winning formula, but I think given every yarn he writes is pretty distinct, they actually benefit from having very different artwork styles. That's my theory anyway.
