Always Never
We first meet Ana and Zeno as they’re meeting each other for a nighttime stroll in the rain. It’s their first proper date after a chance meeting forty years ago and they plan to savor it for as long as they can. What took them so long to finally get together? Life. Ana’s took her to city hall and a quest to build a bridge that her town sorely needed. Also, marriage and a daughter as well. Zeno wound up living a life at sea, bouncing from port to port as he slowly ground out the research needed for his dissertation on quantum mechanics. It’s a dissertation that posits that if a force could stop time in its tracks, we could find a way to travel back through it. Which is exactly how this story is told.
“Always Never” is an enjoyable story of a long-delayed romance that has hitched itself to a sizeable but familiar gimmick. Instead of starting at the beginning of Ana and Zeno’s romance, we begin at its end and get to witness all of the twists and turns it took to finally get them together. Theoretically this should add more suspense to their tale as we’re left to wonder what kind of initial encounter they had in order to kick off this lengthy relationship. While the execution on the final chapter showcasing this reveal is a sight to behold, I can’t quite say that it justifies telling this story in reverse.
Still, Ana and Zeno make for a charming pair of leads and each chapter of their tale makes for a nice self-contained slice of their lives. Creator Jordi Lafebre also delivers some wonderfully appealing art. Her characters are vibrantly expressive, with an elasticity to them that recalls the best of Disney’s 2D animation. That helps sell the story and the gimmick that it’s working under, which ultimately isn’t a bad one. It did get me to read “Always Never” both front to back and back to front and I can say that its modest charms endure however which way you read it.