Faith and the Future Force

Jody Houser, Stephen Segovia (Illustrator) Barry Kitson (Illustrator), Diego Bernard (Illustrator) Valiant Entertainment (DECEMBER), Softcover $9.99 (112pp) 978-1-68215-233-1

A nontraditional (read: overweight) superheroine leads a group of friends and enemies against a threat to time itself in Faith and the Future Force.

Faith Herbert, living under the alias Summer Smith due to her status as a wrongly accused fugitive, is also the superheroine Zephyr. Faith is recruited by Timewalker, another heroine, who seeks help in stopping a powerful robot from dismantling time itself.

Several encounters with the robot each result in failure—and a message sent back to the present to get more help for the next try. Eventually, Faith recruits her archenemy, a frustrated actor-turnedvillain, for a final assault on the robot. The book collects issues one through four of the Faith and the Future Force comic book series.

Though full of exciting, time-twisting adventure, what sets the book apart is its sense of humor, from Ank, Timewalker’s dinosaur-woman companion, offering to “protect your head creature” as Faith removes her wig, to the many wry references to other science fiction standards like Doctor Who and Star Trek. The art is excellent, with careful attention paid to details from the many time periods shown throughout the story.

Though it lacks the ubiquitous captions and editor’s notes that marked Marvel comics of the 1970s and ‘80s, Faith and the Future Force brings a similar joie de vivre. With alliterative names like Summer Smith and Chris Chriswell and a main character who faces pressure from her editor to get an article finished (in between saving the world), it’s easy to see this book, and the Valiant style, as a worthy twenty-first-century successor to Marvel’s glory days.