As time goes on, we must return back to the pile. It has shortened slightly after all this time, but with time comes new series and issues and the propensity to wait for some of them to simply end before I finally get to them. Time makes that happen every time. But at least for the series I’m looking at this week, time does feature at the center of it, both in terms of it being traveled and it running out for the characters. For our time together this week, we’re taking a look at the first book of Liam Sharp’s epic, Starhenge.

Starhenge is a book about exploration and our follies for reaching so far beyond the stars when we finally learn how to travel faster than light. It’s about The Cast—an ancient AI laying dormant on a planet orbiting Proxmia Centuri B—and the war they wage on humanity for our own good. But then it’s also about magic and the creation of Arthurian legends. But then this is relevant for the future as magic is one of the only things humanity can wield against The Cast as its unpredictability is unintelligible to their machine intelligence. That magic, however, is running thin to the point of nonexistence, which prompts the Ur-Queen of humanity to send her son, Wyltt, to the past to become the Merlin of legend and perpetuate magic far into the future. And yet the machinations of The Cast can appear anywhere and Merlin’s life spirals as he tries to maintain that magic through the reign of Arthur. 

The ways in which Starhenge plays with time help to create this continual disconnect through its first six issues. Switching from the far-flung future in the middle of humanity’s last war to the present and another set of characters in Amber and Daryl to the fifth and sixth centuries maintains this braided timeline that feels like it can’t ever converge due to the vast spans of time covered. Until the timelines doe converge and then the legends and stories we hear about from other characters feel all the more real. The characters take on these mythic qualities as aspects of the far future are sent through time to aid them during their tribulations. For what we have now, it feels like this is the foundation upon which the rest of the stories will rest as the main characters all come into place to push us into the realm of magic and deeper into the future.

For an opening, this volume of Starhenge gives us what we need to feel immersed in its world from the first issue. We know our stakes, we know our players, and we know the result of failure. Sharp shows us just enough to make us doubt the potential future already in motion that we can see coming, but we have to follow along with the mythology he’s rewriting along the way. 

Get excited. Get mythic.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.