IN THIS ONE... Time was the Pied Piper and it's back to capture young people at rock concerts.
REVIEW: Rather too short for its own good - the ending is rushed as a result - The Pied Piper was nonetheless on track to be one of the best strips in the collection. It starts with Sapphire and Steel confronting the Pied Piper of Hamlin in the Middle Ages (I love it when we see the "younger" agents, contemporaries with history), an aspect of Time they manage to defeat, but not before it scatters the souls of all the children across lower-case T time. Cut to the present day and they notice a teenager who is a reincarnated soul from Hamlin and we're off and running. Kids all over the world are going to see acts like "Evil Eric"'s and following these various pipers into another dimension, a kind of icy time cave where all but the main teenager are passed out on the floor as if dead. The agents eventually find their way to the cave, and use a metronome to banish Time and send all the kids home. In the final panel, they admit that nobody will understand what they've done, but surely, as readers, we deserve to? But that's what I mean about it being too short. Lots of great ideas, but we needed more pages to explain the agents' plan, what the Piper had in store for the one character he left awake, etc.
The art makes up for some of the weaknesses, showing Ranson at his most clever. There's the destruction of a sundial in Hamlin that has the Piper himself decomposing into bricks. There's the word "ensnare" punctuated by foreground snare drums. Strong body postures, colors worthy of rock shows, and a trippy time tunnel for the kids to run through. I could definitely have used more pages of that.
READABILITY: Medium-High - A good story to end on, it just ends too quickly.
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