Time Shifters, by Chris Grine, for Timeslip Tuesday

I picked up the graphic novel Time Shifters, by Chirs Grine (Graphix, May 2017) up at the library a few weeks ago, feeling pleased and proud that I was Planning in Advance for a future timeslip Tuesday.  I finished it about ten minutes ago, which goes to show that planning in advance is not always pointful.  I almost didn't finish Time Shifters, though, because I wasn't sure that there was ever going to be enough time travel in it to justify it getting a Timeslip Tuesday slot.  There is, although not till the very end....

Luke's brother drowned trying to save him, after a group of bullies attacked them, and Luke is caught in a pit of grief for months (passing quickly by in graphic form).  Then one evening there's a "shoomph" and a strange glow outside, and Luke goes to see what it is.  Turns out a Vampire Napoleon, a mummy, and an animate skeleton are crashing around in the woods, and they've just dropped the precious device they're supposed to be looking after into the snow.  Instead of the device, they pick up Luke's flashlight, and Luke ends up with the device...

Which leads to him being kidnapped by another a group of odd characters, who are rescuing him and saving the device.   Now he's on a planet inhabited by sentient giant insects with a robot who was an alternate world's Abe Lincoln, a ghost girl, a dinosaur and the old scientist who made the gadget in the first place.  The trio of bad guys have followed them; their evil master needs the gadget to get domination over the universe.  But the three henchmen are fairly bumbling (and very amusing to the reader!); other threats prove more pressing.

The device was once a time machine, but that function had been deactivated.  In the stress of it's final recharging, though, the time travel component was reactivated, and instead of being taken home to the same night he left, as everyone had been expecting, he arrives back on earth just as the bullies plan their attack.....so yes, time travel.

And this is the sort of time travel where there are consequences, and time lines altered.  Poignant, and bittersweet that the brother is still alive, but that this Luke is now on his own path....

It's a more thought provoking, satisfying book than the cover had lead me to believe.  There is some emotional depth here, that makes for good reading.  And the henchmen really are very amusing!  Give this one to fans of Zita the Space Girl, by Ben Hatke.

There's a two star review on Amazon from someone who  found "the storyline difficult to follow as the dialogue jumped from the good guys to the bad guys."  I am easily confused by graphic novels, but I had no problem at all with the point of view changing here.  The bad guys, after all, were Vampire Napoleon, a skeleton, and a mummy, and the visual clues Helped me.  A little focus, a little concentration....  Since the same Amazon reviewer didn't grasp that the characters had done an  interdimensional jump type thing and not time travel (at no point in our planet's history was there a wild west with sentient bug cowboys), I think her two star review is a pretty unreliable indictor of anything about the book.