My Time Machine by Carol Lay

Comics take time to make, and come out at moments in time - that's the same as any media product, obviously. But comics often take longer, and the method of creation means they're harder to change, late in the creation, than a prose book would be.

Carol Lay is ambivalent about the future in My Time Machine. I don't want to say it's a lucky ambivalence - it's probably built in, from the beginning, as she thought about the story she wanted to tell - but I think she conceptualized this book starting right around the 2020 election and it was published a couple of weeks before the 2024 election, which obviously foretell very different futures.

So, as I said, the dark aspects of the future her time traveler sees in My Time Machine may seem even more likely now than they did even a few months ago.

Lay's protagonist is unnamed, a woman in her sixties, some kind of artist or creator, living in Sacramento. It's Lay herself: the book doesn't say that explicitly, but we know it. It's very much like her self-insert character in her Story Minute/Way Lay strips. The book is set in the modern day, starting in 2016 and running - aside from the time travel - through 2020.

In this world, Wells's Time Traveler was real, and his time-machine plans come into the narrator's hands, over a hundred years later. She gives them to her ex, Rob, a physics professor at Stanford, who gets obsessed and spends the next few years building a working, advanced version of the machine.

This is the story of her journey, alone in that machine, roughly following the outline of the original Traveler. She jumps to 2035 to see the near future, then in quick steps of five or ten years, then to 802,701 AD, to see if there are Morlocks and Eloi, and finally to 30,002,020 AD, to see the end.

Our narrator is most concerned with climate change; her stated purpose is to bring back proof of how the world will be devastated, which somehow she hopes to leverage to change things in her modern day. She and Rob discuss this, and neither is particularly optimistic - or has a half-plausible mechanism for actually changing things - but she wants to see the future, she assumes a warming Earth will destroy everything, and she wants to accomplish something, so this is her goal.

It doesn't quite work out that way. The 2035 she finds is a dystopian nightmare of pervasive surveillance, collapsing food-production, climate refugees, and dictatorial government. It's also almost the last time she sees human beings at all.

Jumping forward, she sees her surroundings change, burned out by the warming planet, and then somewhat recover when she hits 800k AD. But there is a hostile element in that era - which I won't spoil - and she has to flee that world, as well.

Eventually - well, the book starts at this moment, so more than eventually - she's thirty million years in the future, looking out at a once-again-dead world, dealing with a balky time machine. Will she make it back to 2020 to report on what she saw? That's the story here: you need to read it to find out.

I always like Lay's art - she's a bit less spiky than usual here, with full-color and full pages surrounding her people, so it's not quite as Lay-like as I expected. (I feel like the Story Minute years were the purest Lay drawings, all pointy jaws and spiky hands and stark black-and-white.) And I'm roughly in sympathy with her (not overt, but clear) political concerns here as well. Any time-travel story is always, paradoxically, intensely about the cultural moment when it's created, and this is no exception. This is a good one, with a clear, distinct take on the outlines of the original Wells story.