Station to Station
Written by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman
Art by Gabriel Hardman
Published by Dark Horse
From Corina Bechko and Gabriel Hardman comes Station to Station, an ambitious if slightly overstuffed piece of sci fi action. Collecting a story originally printed in Dark Horse Presents #19-21, Station to Station opens with a mysterious disaster striking Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay area. Our action hero/scientist Tim has been mucking about in inter-dimensional travel, having built a machine to peek into other universes. As is the norm in sci-fi, Tim’s ambitions and technology betray him, and he accidentally opens a door when he meant to only open a window. Which means dinosaurs and aliens attacking the Earth, with more to follow. It falls to Tim to set it all straight before the world falls to ruin.
20 pages or so is not a lot of time to tell a story, and Bechko and Hardman do well to cram as many cool ideas as they can into Station to Station’s brief page count. Hardman’s art brings it all to vivid life, and when he offers up a panel of Tim, in labcoat and glasses, riding a pterodactyl and attacking an alien the size of a building with a lazer gun, it’s obviously a welcome meeting point for a bunch of disparate geeky fantasies. Yet for all its wild adventure and gritty art, Station to Station lacks desperately in all those elements that make a tale truly, deeply satisfying. Its characters are thinly sketched and do little to differentiate themselves from the most basic of archetypes. Its plot is rudimentary, and its twists blatantly telegraphed. When you add it all up, Station to Station just doesn’t really mean anything.
Station to Station is fun and breezy, but it suffers badly from misplaced priorities as far as pure storytelling goes. Yet to pick at the story may dismiss the book’s simple, earnest intentions. Maybe Hardman and Bechko are far more interested in pitting Tim against awesome monsters from both the past and future than investigating what makes him a unique and beautiful snowflake. And really, who could blame them?