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‘Now and Then: Kill Me’ – Comic Book Review

At its core, Kill Me is a really simple story. It’s about a man who ruins his life, then has a chance to go back in time and fix things. But, surrounding that basic concept are a whole lot of other events that make the story seem much more complicated than it is.

The story ran in the Dark Horse Presents anthology comic over three issues. Since it was just a small section in another comic, each part is only 8 pages long, making the whole thing only about as long as a regular comic issue. They pack a lot into those pages, though.

Jack, the protagonist, traces the entire downward spiral of his life over the last 22 years to the moment when he dumped his girlfriend at the amusement park where they both worked. Now, 22 years later, he’s come back to the park to kill himself. But, somehow, instead, he finds himself flung back in time to that fateful day 22 years ago. Unfortunately, due to some sort of time loop paradox, a myriad of identical copies of himself have also been brought back to the amusement park. Now, instead of killing himself, he needs to kill . . . himself. Every single copy is on a quest to kill all the others and be the last man standing: the one who finally gets to fix everything that went wrong.

It’s not entirely clear why all of these copies would need to kill one another when they all have exactly the same ultimate goal, nor is it at all clear why Jack’s time traveling created so many copies of himself. The words “time loop” and “paradox” are thrown around a bit, but beyond those vague intimations, little actual explanation is given.

There are some clever bits in this story, though, particularly while all of the different Jacks are roaming the park trying to pick each other off. The Jack that’s narrating the story will suddenly be shot by another Jack, and the narration shifts seamlessly to his internal monologue.

This is very much a “just go with it” story. Nothing about it makes sense if you think about it too hard, but if you just take things at face value, it’s fairly entertaining.

Steven W. Alloway, Fanbase Press Contributor

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