This year, I decided to do something different for Fred Van Lente Day, I'm going to review one issue of Ivar, Timewalker a day, leading up to Fred Van Lente Day!

We continue with Ivar, Timewalker #5, by Fred Van Lente, Francis Portela and Andrew Dalhouse...

In the fifth issue of Ivar, Timewalker, Fred Van Lente makes very clever use of the time travel approach of the comic by telling stories out of order to striking effect. For instance, we see something happen at the beginning of the issue and then later we see HOW it happened. Stuff like that.

The highlight of this first part of the Breaking History storyline is that Ivar enlists the help of his two brothers, Gilad and Aram (the heroes known as the Eternal Warrior and Armstrong, respectively) to help him rescue Neela from her future self, who is the head of an evil group of sort of time-traveling nihilists (lots of nihilism in Van Lente's Valiant work).

He takes Gilad and Aram from different points in time, though, as he plucks Gilad from a point in time when Gilad's millennias-long mission to protect the Earth might be at the end of the line...

Neela, meanwhile, is being courted by her future self, who WE know is evil, but Neela can't see that way since, well, you know, it's HER.

I like how Van Lente uses secondary characters to explore Neela and Ivar's feelings for each other. People often are the last ones to know what they are feeling about someone and very often their friends see it before them. So Van Lente smartly has the secondary characters (namely Gilad and future Neela) express the sort of hidden desires Ivar and Neela have for each other.

Francis Portela and Andrew Dalhouse adapt wonderfully - they don't lose a beat from the strong work of Clayton Henry and Brian Reber. The dark future of Gilad is depicted particularly well - there is also this really clever layout bit where someone's head is chopped off, but it happens JUST off panel. It's a really neat effect.

Ivar continues to be a strong book!