Station to Station (one-shot)

written by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman
art by Gabriel Hardman

Physicist Tim, a researcher in San Francisco affiliated with Berkley, is one of a team of scientists that creates a machine to provide mankind insight into alternative timelines.  Unexpectedly, their machine allows creatures from those timelines to invade their research island, including one enormous, partially transparent, levitating, mind-controlling alien monster.

"I thought we were building a window....  It turned out to be a door."  (Station to Station: 15)

Station to Station is Bechko and Hardman's homage to classic, eerie sci-fi, in the vein of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and kaiju horror.  It's a tight-knit tale with enough collateral effects to make one salivate for more.

After the mysterious explosion which took out the Bay Bridge and seemingly all of Treasure Island, Tim emerges from unconsciousness amid the littered remains of other worlds:  an unfamiliar and creepy crustacean, a crashed alien spacecraft, a prehistorically large crocodile with extra-long teeth, and some kind of space gun that his friend and fellow scientist Luis claims to have just found, which considering the rest of the debris isn't too hard to believe.  Meanwhile, the mainland is at a loss to explain the explosion or the absence of life signs on the island.  Tim's proximity to the rift opened by his machine—a proximity which also gives him the sight of an imminent invasion of alien monsters ready to enter their world—provides him with a useful immunity to the creature's mind-control powers, but to the rest of the world, it remains entirely cloaked and imperceptible.  And it's using the island's surviving residents to rebuild a larger machine to facilitate their invasion.

Tim's heroic moment is the fantasy of young boys everywhere.  Stealing Luis's space gun and hitching a ride on a saddled pterodactyl, which similarly got sucked through the alternative-timeline rift, he uses the gun to improvise a bomb.  The force of the explosion temporarily reveals the monster—only for one frame in most video equipment—to the outside world, who are then able to target their military response accordingly.  The final twist Station to Station offers isn't particularly unexpected, but it's still so well-executed that it impresses.  Even more intriguing and delightful, the clean-up crews responsible for rounding up the timeline detritus, like stray dinosaurs, makes for humorous background illustrations and promising potential for future installments should Bechko and Hardman revisit this world.

Collects a story originally printed in Dark Horse Presents #19-21