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Paper Girls (2015)
Published
Four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls start their rounds in the early hours after Halloween 1988 and are thrown into the future, and the series keeps faith with every crossing it sets up over 30 issues. What lifts it is that the time travel is about growing up: the future is something these girls have to face and live with, not a sightseeing trip.
Cliff Chiang's art keeps each era readable at a glance, which matters once the jumps start stacking, and the series won the 2016 Eisner Awards for Best New Series and Best Penciller/Inker. It is finished, so the complete paperback gives you the whole loop in one go.
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X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Published
Uncanny X-Men #141–142, 1981
Two issues by Chris Claremont and John Byrne that set the template: in a future where Sentinels hunt mutants, the telepath Rachel sends Kitty Pryde's mind back into the body of her thirteen-year-old self to stop the assassination of Senator Kelly that started it all. Sending a mind rather than a body is a neat rule, because it keeps one Kitty in each time and spares the story any meeting-yourself muddle.
The ending is the bit that rewards a second read. Kelly is saved, yet he restarts the Sentinel programme anyway, so the fix is partial and the future it was meant to erase never feels safely gone. At two issues, it is also the quickest read here.
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Erased (2017)
Published
Kei Sanbe's manga gives its time travel one strict and personal rule. Satoru Fujinuma, floundering through life at 29, is thrown by a "Revival" eighteen years into the past, back to his childhood, with a chance to save Kayo Hinazuki, the girl who was kidnapped and murdered when he was a boy the first time around.
Because he only has a child's freedom to act, every change costs effort and nerve, and the mystery of who the killer is runs alongside the question of what changing the past does to the present. It is the most suspenseful entry here and the one where the stakes feel most personal. Yen Press publishes it in English.
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Octavia E. Butler's Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2017)
Published
Damian Duffy and John Jennings's adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's novel is the darkest entry here and the one where the paradox matters most. Dana, a young Black woman, is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre-Civil War South, and as she moves between the two she becomes entangled in the life of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder who is one of her own ancestors.
That knot is never played as a puzzle for its own sake: her own existence is bound up with a man whose world could destroy her, and each trip back leaves its mark. Jennings's art makes the violence of the past impossible to skim. It won the Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium.
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The Umbrella Academy: Dallas (2008)
Published
Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's second six-issue series turns its time travel into a family argument. Number Five, it emerges, once worked for a shadowy timeline protection organisation that tasked him with killing John F. Kennedy, and a mistake from that job threatens another apocalypse, so the family heads back to the 1960s with half of them trying to eliminate JFK and the other half trying to save him.
The sharp joke underneath is that the "correct" history is the one with the assassination in it, so protecting the timeline means doing something terrible. Fans of the television series will recognise plot points that resurfaced in its second season, but the comic is tighter and stranger.
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Time Before Time (2021)
Published
The best modern pick for readers who like time travel as a business with rules. In 2140, to escape a world with no future, people pay the Syndicate, a criminal organisation, to smuggle them back in time to a better life. The story centres on two career criminals who steal their employer's time machine, and soon find that the one thing they cannot outrun is their own past.
Declan Shalvey, Rory McConville and Joe Palmer treat it as crime fiction first, which keeps the paradoxes grounded: every jump has a price, a passenger and someone who wants a cut. Image has collected it in six volumes, so there is plenty to read once it hooks you.
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Booster Gold (2007)
Published
52 Pick-Up, issues #1–6 by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz and Dan Jurgens, 2007
The time-travelling hero from tomorrow turns down Justice League membership to help Rip Hunter police the timelines, while a villain exploits the damaged time stream hoping to eliminate the world's greatest heroes. The clever twist is that doing the job well means staying a secret: Booster becomes an outcast hero who is quietly among the most important people in the universe, while the public still sees a joke.
It is the lightest entry here and the most fun, built on decades of DC history that rewards readers who know it, though the opening arc explains enough to follow.
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Avengers Forever (1998)
Published
The 1998 to 1999 series by Kurt Busiek, Roger Stern and Carlos Pacheco
The superhero entry for readers who enjoy a timeline being tidied as much as broken. Immortus, Master of Time, and the Time-Keepers set out to destroy Rick Jones, and a team of Avengers pulled from different points in their history, including a past Captain America, Hawkeye and Yellowjacket, find themselves helped by Kang the Conqueror.
Its real achievement is housekeeping on a heroic scale: Busiek uses the time travel to explain away decades of contradictory Avengers continuity, so long-time readers get answers as well as spectacle. Newcomers can still enjoy Pacheco's crowded, era-hopping pages, but this one pays best if you know some Avengers history.
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Meanwhile (2010)
Published
Jason Shiga's pick-a-path comic puts the timeline in your hands. You follow thin tubes and tabs from panel to panel, forwards, backwards and upside down, choosing as you go among 3,856 story possibilities that take in time machines, doomsday devices and quantum physics.
For a paradox lover this is the purest test on the list, because you can actually go back, try again and watch a choice ripple out, then work out how the branches fit together. Mapping it becomes a puzzle in its own right. It suits readers who enjoy logic games and branching plots more than a single emotional arc.
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Here (2014)
9.0/10on Open Library
Published
The wild card: no machine, no traveller, and still the most radical treatment of time here. Richard McGuire fixes the view on a single corner of one room and lets it become many things across thousands of years, with frames from different moments opening inside the page, some reaching backwards and some forwards.
Because nothing can be changed, there are no paradoxes to break, only echoes between moments that you connect yourself. It grew from a six-page strip in RAW magazine in 1989 into the Pantheon book of 2014. Read it slowly, then flip back through it, which is exactly what it is built for.
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Le Piège diabolique (1989)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
Blake and Mortimer: The Time Trap, by Edgar P. Jacobs, 1962
The classic of the list, and a time machine story built on a grudge. The mad scientist Miloch, believed dead, leaves his estate and his Chronoscaphe to Professor Mortimer, the only man he considered an intellectual equal, but the selector controls have been sabotaged, leaving Mortimer no way to steer home.
What follows is a forced tour through a prehistoric world of giant plants and dinosaurs, a feudal rebellion and a future ruled by a global dictator, with Mortimer improvising his way out of each. It is adventure rather than paradox puzzle, but the trap is fair and its logic holds. The English edition from Cinebook is the easy way in.
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Chrononauts (2015)
Published
The loosest rules on the list, included because it knows exactly what it is. Mark Millar and Sean Gordon Murphy send Dr Corbin Quinn and his right-hand man Danny Reilly, the world's first Chrononauts, into the timestream on live television, and they promptly start treating history as a playground.
Do not come for airtight causality: the fun is two brilliant idiots discovering that a time machine is the ultimate temptation, and Murphy's art makes every era-hopping set piece look like a blockbuster. Read it after the stricter picks as a palate cleanser, and enjoy spotting where the paradoxes are being waved away. A sequel, Futureshock, followed.
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