By Jonathan Edwards

Retcon is shit. It’s always been shit. There was zero chance this finale was going to be anything but shit. But, that makes it no less of an infuriating endeavor to read. Frankly, even with only four issues, this book has no business being a monthly series. Waiting until the third issue to start touching upon the marketed premise is entirely too long in any scenario, but here, where that also amounts to over half of the series, that’s unacceptable. They might’ve been able to get away with it if this had been published as an OGN, but that still wouldn’t fix the bigger, more foundational problems. Namely, Retcon doesn’t do anything with its eponymous concept. Yes, it’s about a repeating timeline, but unlike, say, Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, the “Mystery Spot” episode of Supernatural or pretty much any other story that also does that, we only get to see the events of a single repetition play out. As such, the already shallow characters get little to no genuine development, and we effectively can’t understand what makes the current repetition different, let alone the significance of that difference, if we don’t see at least some of the other repetitions as well. Sure, they kind of try to explain what’s changed, but there’s no satisfaction in that. Time loop narratives just don’t work when you don’t show the fucking time loops.