A Beautiful Gory Display — Kickstart Comics

Our heroes meet up with a man known as “The Fence”, who can reunite the kids with their parents, if they retrieve artifacts strewn throughout history, and from there, the plot just takes off, and I’m going to avoid spoiling any further twists.  There are alternate futures, betrayals, future selves meeting their present selves, and suspicious motives throughout.  It’s crazy fun.

There are so many great ideas in this story.  I love that the kids have to replace the artifacts with copies so as not to alter the past.  Of course, you know that will go horribly wrong at some point, which just takes the story in another fun direction.  Rift Raiders is a big, sprawling story that pinballs from one concept to another.  It’s a crazy sprint through the timestream that doesn’t stop to take a breath.  It jumps from Civil War-era steampunk exoskeletons to sentient dinosaurs to a stopover in Arthurian England.  And the whole time, the characters are rock-solid and well-defined, keeping even the most insane scenes grounded.