The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 285: The Infinite Loop #4, July 2015

Alright, getting back on track. Weekends can be funny things, sometimes, especially around the holiday season.

When I read this issue, I had a similar feeling to reading issue #21 of The Invisibles v.2. Everything in that comic happens out of sequence as a result of the activation of a time machine. In The Infinite Loop, it's not a time machine that's activated, but the time manipulation powers of Teddy (last name unknown). To add to the confusion, she's beset by multiple versions of herself who've just revealed to her that various iterations of her are actually the organization that she's ostensibly been working against all this time. Needless to say, for both Teddy and the reader, things are getting a bit weird.

The similarity to that issue of The Invisibles isn't solely due to the non-linear nature of the story. In that penultimate issue of the second part of Morrison's opus, there's a love story going on too. King Mob is about to say goodbye to Ragged Robin for what he thinks will be the last time, and for a brief moment we're witness to an emotion from KM that we've not yet seen - love. This is not to say that he's not working to stop the Archons out of a large sort of revolutionary love, but this love is a personal, individual one, directed at a girl from the future who has to go home.

I think, were I to level a criticism at The Infinite Loop, it's that it doesn't integrate these two stories quite as nicely as "All Tomorrow's Parties" does. I'm never sure whether the time war or the love story should be the main thrust of the tale, and I get the feeling it's creators are unsure as well. Not that one should stay and one should go, but there ought to be some indication as to which is the primary narrative arc and which the secondary. I know that they're fundamentally intertwined, but the equal privileging they're receiving makes it difficult to completely commit to either story. Again, for both the reader and the writers, I'd think. Hopefully they'll wrap up together nicely, and this criticism will fade away in light of the story's end. But we may have to wait a bit to see. I'm going to try to track down the next two issues soon, but until then I think it'll be random comics for a bit. I'm feeling kind of random right now.