‘Timeslide’ #1 Does Too Little With Too Much To Do

For the last few years, Marvel has closed out their publishing year with a time travel-related one-shot intended to tease upcoming storylines in the year to come. Timeslide #1, this year’s effort, centers on a pair of time-traveling X-Men: Bishop and Cable. As such, it’s as much a follow-up to the pair’s “Fall of X” miniseries, Children of the Vault, (as well as writer Steve Foxe‘s Heir of Apocalypse miniseries) as it is a preview book … and it manages to succeed as neither. 

The plot centers around the Children of the Vault striking back after their defeat in their eponymous miniseries by doing their usual hyper-evolution trick to create a post-mutant named Vacuna capable of, essentially, eating time. This prompts a time-traveling Tempus (from later in her own personal timeline than the one who was most recently one of the Five and off in the White Hot Room on Krakoa) to recruit Bishop and Cable to stop the Children, more or less on the grounds that they just did so in that earlier miniseries.

Vacuna’s ability to move through time and “devour” key events creates the opportunity for artist Ivan Fiorelli to revisit key moments from X-Men history (and Heir of Apocalypse) ably (if unexcitingly). This is also the vehicle used to tease future stories (as Cable and Bishop encounter a list of upcoming storylines during one of their stops in the future), which is where the problems come in.

Is Timeslide #1 meant to be a sequel to Children of the Vault or a “Marvel Now” style preview of things to come? In trying to be both, it accomplishes neither. As a sequel to the earlier story involving the Children of the Vault, it risks further diminishing some significant X-Men villains for little gain.

The involvement of Cable and Bishop in the plot is predicated on their earlier defeat of the Children. By having them do it again, it demeans the threat of the Children in the future. If just Cable and Bishop can repeatedly foil their plans, how much of a threat are they, really? 

Meanwhile, the Children’s menace is being diminished for little gain. The bulk of this extra-sized issue is spent on Cable and Bishop chasing Vacuna through time. While the ultimate mechanism of Vacuna’s defeat is clever, in the end, very little time is spent teasing future events, the ostensible reason for this issue to even exist.

Aside from the one-page shot of future story titles (presented entirely out of context) and a couple non-story pages at the end teasing upcoming comics even more directly, very little of Timeslide #1 has anything to do with future teases.

This leaves an issue that spends a lot of pages telling a thoroughly average story with standard Marvel house style art that accomplishes very little other than to further diminish the impact of the Children of the Vault. As a sequel to the earlier Children story, it adds little (and arguably takes away more).

Yet it also fails as a marketing vehicle for promoting 2025 comics, spending far too little time on that element while featuring characters that have little narrative or thematic connection to the teased events (Cable and Bishop aren’t even featured in any current X-books; this is their first appearance since the end of the Krakoa Era, with no announced future appearances as of this writing).

Ultimately, Timeslide #1 is a perfectly fine issue in terms of its craft. But in achieving whatever its ultimate goal is — whether a Cable/Bishop action romp and/or a sneak peak at things to come — it fails.