The other day I finally wrote another post on the story of Time Before Time, it's one of the first comics I picked up last year around summer when I just started to get into the world of comics. Even though I still haven't finished it and took a large break from it, it remains one of my favourite comic book reads to date due to how creative and unique the story and art are. There are few comic books that manage to have long runs like this, particularly with the quality that this has, and now that the story has finally come to an end, I have jumped back into it at my own pace and picked it up where I left off. There are a total of twenty-nine volumes of the comic and I've now reached the eleventh, and even here I have noticed that the story is starting to get a bit more serious and throw some surprises at the reader. The last volume saw the characters running around in different time periods yet again, as one seeks their long lost family, and the other struggles to avoid the people hunting him down for participating in the theft of one of the time machines. A heavy focus on the actions of the syndicate as they orchestrate their plans to increase their fleet with new upgrades. A lot of little corners of the story to unpack in one volume, but rather in-depth with plenty of world building.
That previous volume ending with the reveal that our protagonist is supposedly dying. It was a bit of a cliffhanger ending for the volume that didn't dive into how and why and when. A scan from a robot revealing this to him and the reader. Fortunately I waited for the comic to end, so I'm not stuck with that cliffhanger and desperately waiting for the next release like I have been with all else I've been reading as of late! This volume picked up precisely where the previous left off, with Tatsuo immediately denying the scan's revelation. Claiming the robot was completely wrong and that he's completely fine, though it becomes clear that something really is off with him with some strange markings appearing on his body. The realisation that the pods he was using were not protected from the radiation that one would be exposed to through time travel; and this was the very thing he wanted to avoid and escape from to begin with due to the syndicate's generally poor attention to the safety of its workers. Typical cyberpunk dystopia stuff, really! At this point I almost assumed that something later would happen to save the protagonist with this, that he couldn't possibly die off so soon. Though I also began to expect that the story from here might follow the decline of his health as he seeks a cure. Perhaps there's something way into the future?
Despite the news of Tatsuo's illness that's slowly killing him, the volume again moved on to the events taking place around the syndicate, where recent events had led to inner turmoil causing the corporation to lose some of its stability. Raids unfolding during meetings, backstabbing as different people within the corporation believe they're more fit to lead it. This leads to the new successor being murdered and immediately replaced. It showed how this corporation was being operated, how even the workers of it had realised they'd given up too much for it and been given nothing in return. That each person is expendable. We saw this in a previous volume to which one of the bosses that handled the time travel operations was killed off, his father left to pick up the pieces and clearly unhappy with how things had turned out. I've liked getting this perspective so far, it's nice to see the different factions displayed but also their lack of stability during this situation. The theft of a pod and the bandits running through time slowly causing havoc and dismantling their entire operation leading to desperate measures. Also showing that a corporation so corrupt that it can barely function on its own. We also see the cover ups that they're happy to immediately implement to cover themselves from the higher-ups, altering the truth in efforts to stay under the radar, taking advantage of deaths and other circumstances to mask things.
This is the most we've seen of the actual syndicate so far, whereas before it was mostly from the perspectives of the regular people and workers that help people travel through time. Where we knew they were an evil corporation with little regard for human life, but not to this level to which even the corporation's very structure had little regard for itself. As a contrast we even see how the other workers end up giving up their own lives for the corporation, being stuck within different time periods essentially waiting for something to happen. There are additional factions so it's interesting to see consider how the comic might start to address more of them and give them additional narrative going into later volumes. Especially those that are often mentioned like The Union and Arcola Institute. Somewhat hinted with the characters stating that in certain times these factions are found within them, and that's where they might be heading. I do like that this is how the narrative unfolds, that people are still within different time periods and how they often utilise those periods to their advantage based on how they operate.
This volume continues the current trend of each one being just as good as the previous. Things are kept within motion despite there being so many volumes within this story. It doesn't seem like it slows down or stagnates in any way to lengthen itself. It's more that it utilises that additional time to really build the world and give us a variety of characters that are all somehow connected in some way to this story regardless of the time period. And that each move someone makes in a different time is still contributing to the various pieces moving against each other in a greater game being played, and those characters even discuss it themselves.