Matt Kindt helped launch the comic phenomenon BZRKR, whose 1st issue was the highest grossing single issue comic book of this century. BZRKR is chaotic, dark, violent, and deeply compelling. Kindt has now launched a new comic that is also chaotic, dark, violent, and deeply compelling story.
Save Now centers around hero named Saver. He has a special superpower that lets him make "save points" in his own timeline. Whenever he wants, he can go back to those save points. However, he cannot travel forward in time except at the normal pace. So he could go back 10 years, but to get back to the present, he would have to live all 10 years again, aging even more as he goes. He mostly uses his power to go back just a few minutes after his fellow superheroes get killed in battle so that he can direct them how to defeat the bad guys. For the others, they feel like they've one the first time around, undefeated. For him, he has to live through every loss.
The main plot of the story revolves around the fact that in the future the world falls into an apocalypse. The other heroes want Saver to go back into the past and fix it. He refuses because he says he's tried over and over again and it hasn't worked. And each time he goes, he ages more. Finally, through some blackmail, they convince him to go again ten years in the past. To prevent the apocalypse, he has them do some very morally compromising things.
Does it work?
I don't want to spoil it. But I will say the last page hooked me. I need to find out what happened.
One of the fascinating things about this book is that it taps into the common experience of video games and save points without referencing video games directly. But you get the same feeling of frustration of having to return defeat after defeat and maybe having to go back further in the game to grind your way up to defeat the villain.
Like BZRKR, Saver isn't a good person. He lives in the moral gray or even the moral evil. But despite that, there is something moral that compels him. Both books are not nihilistic or relativistic. Instead, you see someone who is morally cynical crash up against moral absolutes and you see if they break against the stone tablets of the moral law. This book may be a bit too violent and dark for some people, but I found the stakes so dire that it pulled me into the moral quandaries of the characters.
Kindt knows how to craft the story built around the character of Saver. He layers the story wonderfully. Just when you think you know what the book is about, he adds another twist. This could have easily been a one-trick gimmick, but Kindt is using it to explore themes like guilt, consequence, and hope.
Tomas Girello's is good. It isn't always to my taste, but some of the shocking and dramatic parts are capture with real jolts of emotion.
As much as I love the classic comic characters, I've been waiting for original stories like this to take hold of me. I don't know if this book will ultimately be about hope or despair, about meaning or nihilism.
But I'm definitely going to stay with it and find out.
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