Review by Frank Plowright

Rusty has sex addiction issues seemingly prompted by underlying insecurities, and he romanticises his poor behaviour by comparing himself to Raskalnikov from Crime and Punishment. The Wormhole Society opens by following him on a Saturday night, which ends with him booking a prostitute named Sonya and treating her appallingly. It’s the spark needed to acknowledge his problems, so he seeks help from an organisation whose solution is to let him travel through time and space.

Francis Levy is adapting his own novel, and if the summary makes events sound rather random it’s because they are. Rusty slips into this unorthodoxy willingly, and there’s time spent explaining the particulars of how he can occupy his equivalents in alternate universes. For all the desire to repent, though, Rusty isn’t equipped with the tools for achieving this, which makes for frequently uncomfortable reading, possibly more so than the original novel for being drawn.

Joseph Silver’s depictions ensure Rusty’s sexual encounters lack eroticism, and although not at first apparent, considerable illustrative diversity is required. Most of The Wormhole Society features compact cartooning with Rusty central to different locations, some simply rendered, and others calling for greater imagination. Silver’s scenes of inter-dimensional transportation are imaginative, and so are later almost Kafkaesque scenes.

Occasional interesting ideas don’t coalesce into a prospective path to redemption largely because The Wormhole Society fails to generate enough sympathy for Rusty. His despicable behaviour precedes the introduction of time travel and it’s a long time before that transcends being just another method of indulgence for him. While sadistic sex is his speciality, readers become complicit in voyeurism as he journeys both to the historical past and equivalents drawn from fiction, punctuated by addiction meetings. For all the self-searching, though, Rusty never convinces as sincere, which is particularly puzzling in the light of late revelations staging him as an alter-ego of author Levy.

The ending supplies a better life to a person who deserves it, but is that Rusty?