Treatment Worse than the Disease — Epochalypse #3

The suspect has been identified. His modus operandi is known. The stakes are clear.

But for the law enforcers charged with untangling this world’s chronological calamity, the question of what to do next is anything but.

In Epochalypse #3, “The Devil’s Den,” Johannes and the key Resynchronizers under his command once more take to the field. They are scouring the countryside for evidence of The Salesman: the black marketer of illegal anachronisms whose criminally short-sighted ends — Johannes believes — is damming up the rightful flow of history.

And The Salesman’s activities continue to exile our hero, and the civilians he serves, in the New Now. And what is the New Now if not a dead-end reality that none one should have to endure? It is a cancerous outgrowth — a tumor — within the curvature of space-time.

But as human life goes on, tumors (and other mortal and morbid conditions) afflict more than just the fabric of reality. People, simply in the course of daily life, are prone to injury, prone to disease. What would you do in a world where life-saving medical advancements from later than 1951 are out there, but highly illegal?

Anyone with less than unshakable faith in the authorities might pay any price to stay alive. And in “The Devil’s Den,” we find out they are. Resynchronizers and anachronism laws be damned.

Johannes and his team are led to shift their sights from The Salesman to one of that smuggler’s most high-level clients: “Dr. Tomorrow.” The elusive Dr. Tomorrow is rumored to be a physician from far in the future who can cure any patient of any wound or illness. That is, if you can find his covert lair. And if you can pay in currency that the good doctor will actually accept.

But as we find out, things aren’t even as simple as that.

“The Devil’s Den” also introduces Ramona Walden: a sensitive and resilient young woman from 1951 who is deeply conflicted by entanglements with Johannes. And these entanglements are both of a professional and of a, let’s say, personal nature.

Art by Shane Davis and an electrifying cover from Dave Johnson! Color art by Maury Hollowell and letters by Patrick Brosseau.