Interesting characters and interesting premise. The artwork was amazing and the plot was compelling enough that I didn't want to stop reading.

BACKTRACK VOL 1:

Second chances. We all want that. But our actions, consequences, regrets add pain to our lives, as a result, we live with it. As a part of our lives, that pain becomes elemental to what we are, what we do, and who we are. Why would we want to alter it? What if we could change it?

This story brings that want to realization. Given a chance to alter some event in her life, the main character feels she must take it. To confront risks known and unknown as possibilities, should she? What does she have to lose? What is there to gain?

The story is compelling. The characters living the story are complex. You will want to read what happens next.

#BacktrackVol1 #NetGalley

Interesting premise about a car race that goes through multiple timelines. Reminds me a bit of the Great Race cartoons that used to run on Saturdays when I was a kid, or something out of a Cannonball Run movie. There's a variety of characters, each with their own secret. The winner has been promised the chance to go back in time and fix their greatest mistake, so at first, it's dog-eat-dog. But fairly soon, the survivors realize they're going to have to work together to get through some of the bigger challenges. Nice, fast-paced story with art that really suits the tone of things well. This might make for a good television series. I could use a bit more depth and maybe there's more coming, as peoples' backstories get filled-in, etc. But I've certainly read worse comics.

Like lots of comic ideas, take a bit from column a and a bit of column b and smush it all together to get yourself a premise. Here - what if Death Race 2000 but travelling in time. So here we are with our lead character, Alyson, a getaway driver with serious regrets offer a chance to wipe out that moment. The hint that time travel is involved comes there, but certainly when the race starts and suddenly they are careening across the jurassic period being chased by dinosaurs. This is not a book where innovation comes in the plotting. As they speed through the Roman empire, or East Berlin in the seventies, writer Brian Joines is happy to tick a lot of genre boxes (each deadly leg kills off at least one racer, the personalities of which are one dimensional to a fault). But using genre saviness to speed the story on is not necessarily a bad thing. Each of the episodes has a flashback to try and explain Alyson's motivation, even though the minute we are aware of a brother and a job gone wrong its pretty obvious. On the other hand the choices of epoch to race through are a little less obvious. Dinosaurs fine, but China before and earthquake and the East Berlin capper is inspired.

Elphick's art is extremely kinetic which is what you want if you are trying to draw this much racing, though the difficulty of showing the key moves often boxes him into a corner (there are only so many times he can plausibly show a car soaring through the air to emphasise speed). The character work is good too broadly, there is a very impressionistic line style for facial expressions and he is lucky that drawing Alyson being grumpy and moody comes to him so easily, If it were a movie though it would be a midnight schlocky guilty pleasure - there aren't many depths here and the last minute reveal (this is halfway through the book) whilst not foreshadowed, comes straight from the textbook of what to do when everyone starts trusting each other. I am assuming it will be wrapped up in one more volume, and I am looking forward to seeing how we get to the finish line without at any second believing the identity of the winner of the race will surprise me at all...

[NetGalley ARC]

This was definitely a great read for me!
Gorgeous artwork, an interesting story and a great collection of characters. The comic throws you straight into the action and then (heh) backtracks to provide your with the reasoning.
I will say the pacing is a little fast at times to get used to who is called what at first but you pick it up easily and don’t waste time with characters you don’t need to know about.

Great story telling and a comic to keep at eye on!

BACKTRACK, Vol. 1 by Brian Joines, Jake Elphick and Doug Garbark is a fun comic book about a car race traveling through time. The main character, Alyson, is a hard edge woman bent to win. The artwork is very moody and evocative to the storyline and all the action is great. There’s a lot going on with all the different characters and their backstories and the many different settings. I especially love the cover of this book! It immediately drew me in. This one is definitely a wild ride!

We follow Levy an ex-getaway drivers whose life seems to have fallen apart. She is offered the chance to enter a literal race through time against 14 others drivers that if she can not only win but survive, she can go back and fix the biggest mistake she made in her live.

It is full of unlikable characters and we are very much pushed towards rooting for Levi, but with 14 other characters with sad and tortured backstories I it found hard to care about any of them.
The background plot of shadowy "villains" messing with the character throughout the race could lead this down an interesting path if done correctly especially with the different historic ages as a backdrop.

Overall an ok first volume to set up the story but not one that i will linger on.

I was drawn straight in with the vivid colours and lines of the drawings, and was not let down by the storytelling. I wanted more at the end - which can only be a good thing! Loved the characters and want to know more about them, thank you so much for the ARC

Color palette and the lines of the drawings captivated me, they are vibrant, clear and sharp which gives story another dimension. Story intrigued me and I would love to read what happened next especially since we didn't get to know all the characters completely, and they seem to be really intriguing.

Backtrack has some of the best comic covers I've seen in awhile, between the layout and design, to the art, inking and coloring. Marco D'Alfonso did an amazing job on them and I keep getting distracted by all of the details in them. I started off like that because it's the main reason I decided to read this trade, along with liking the premise of a time travelling race.

Backtrack Vol. 1 follows Levy, a ex-getaway driver whose life has fallen apart after her last job. When she's offered the chance to go back in time and fix her mistake she doesn't believe it's real - but decides to try to do it anyway. That's how she ends up in a race through <i> literal </i> time, along with 14 other drivers, all willing to do whatever it takes to win.

The premise of Backtrack is such a good one, it's got time travel, dinosaurs (!) and is lowkey reminiscent of Mad Max and Fast and the Furious series. It's a fun balance of cheesy and dark, with some emotional elements to help balance out the action. It's also got those supervillain run fight arena vibes that show up in Marvel and DC, which is a niche trope, but one that I adore. My only complaint is that I wish we had gotten to know the characters a bit more before the story really kicked off. I barely knew who Levy was before I was supposed to root for her in the race, and some of the characters barely got any screen time before being unceremoniously offed ala Slipknot in the Suicide Squad movie. 

Joines isn't the only one who worked on this though. Backtrack has gorgeous interior art by Jake Elphick, the characters all have a pretty distinct design from one another (with the exception of all of the moustaches lol), and I appreciated how much effort went into consistently giving each character a unique face and body type. The art was topped off by beautiful, vibrant colors by Doug Garbark, that keep things interesting without being too overwhelming. A lot of times I feel like the balance between using bright and dark colors tends to lean very heavily to one side or the other, and I loved having an in-between, especially when it was used to show dark moments in the characters' lives.

Overall I enjoyed my introduction Backtrack, and am looking forward to seeing where things go next for Levy, Moirai and everyone else.

Story- This work felt like it had a lot of potential but fell short in a few areas. Overall, I enjoyed my read of this. Getting to see all of the different time periods and people was fascinating, but there were too many characters and I quickly got lost with how was who and what they were doing and why. I think that as the story gets more works in it, that problem will get better, but for this one it was an issue for me.

Artwork- I really enjoyed this artstyle. It was dirty and gritty but had enough character in it to help aid in the storytelling. There were moments where things were confusing, but overall I felt like the artist not only understood how to make graphic novels, but was doing it with style.

[This review is based on an ARC.] The cover art for this volume (and its issues) is phenomenal, so major props to Marco D'Alfonso for that. The actual comic art is...not to my taste at all. As for the story, the premise is hella fun, but the execution leaves something to be desired. The central character's arc and motivation lean way too heavily on cliche (which, I get, in this kind of action-oriented plot, you're going to get cliche, but it's 2020...). The characterization of the rest of the competing misfits was under-baked, at least so far, and it relied on stereotype a lot of the time in a fairly disappointing way. I don't think I'll be reading further volumes, but I wouldn't say no to a poster of the cover...

Car racing graphic novel with each loop offering a different trip through reality. However, it didn't invest the reader in the characters and just wasn't exciting enough.

A lively comic that takes an excessively childish premise and tries its best to do something mature with it. A down-on-her-luck criminal driver is met with in her boozer one night by Mephistopheles, who says if she enters and wins just one car race he can reboot her life, wiping a major mistake and getting her back to the track she wished to find herself on. Of course she qualifies, and enters a race – only for every leg almost to have a Quantum Leap-styled jump through existence. So the first leg is in the Jurassic, the second up to and around a charioteer's course a la Ben Hur. Each and every bit of downtime the annoyingly unattractive contestants all shout at each other a lot, or possibly think of collaborating, or perhaps let slip why they're there, or suddenly become history experts, and it's all just about good enough but certainly no better. The introduction to the characters is awful, and I really couldn't give a monkeys who was who, and the racing action is depicted very badly indeed. So you're left with needing a greater amount of trust than is normally demanded of us, to believe the creators actually know what they're doing and can create an adult comic out of their schoolboy fantasies. That hope wasn't fully met with for me, so this is three stars. It's worth a look, but it fails to shine.

3.7/5
Quality of writing: 3
Plot development: 3
Pace: 4
Characters: 4
Enjoyability: 4
Ease of reading: 4

Really, really enjoyed this. A fun premise, would love to see this as a TV show. The "bad apples", car racing and time travel - yes please!

**I received and voluntarily read an e-ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Great concept, one that would actually translate really well to a TV series.

Execution was a little lacking, mostly due to the fact that there were times that foreign languages were used with no subtitles/translations. Although I could guess what the characters were saying due to context, it took me out of the story.

Nice art, nothing really new or original in the illustrations. Felt that the checkpoint drawings could have been a little more distinguished somehow, maybe by ramping up the contrast between the checkpoint colors versus the current location colors.

Overall, it's a nice story, one I would like to read more of, but it's not something that will stay on my mind bugging me if I don't read a conclusion.

Overall a fun concept with good art. It didn't blow me away, but I enjoyed the reading experience. I especially liked that each character had strong stakes for being in the race-- it helped ground an otherwise ridiculous (but fun) concept.