Brigade Temporelle

Brigade Temporelle (Time Brigade) is a French comic book series created by French writer Claude J. Legrand and Spanish artist Edmond Ripoll for the magazine Futura published by Editions Lug in 1972.

The Time Brigade stories were initially clearly influenced by Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol. When the series begins, 20th century archeologist Jason Spell on a dig in Mesopotamia is recruited to become a member of Delta Hand 28, a four-person operative unit of the Time Brigade, a time-travelling organization from the 40th century. The Brigade is responsible for the monitoring and control of the pludimensionality of Earth, in a segment of the space-time continuum known as Sector Rhamno. This spans our galactic quadrant, six billion years from the creation of the Solar System to some unspecified date in the future, about 1,000,000 years AD, and all of its alternate timelines.

The Brigade functions with teams of four operatives, called a Hand since it reports to an artificial intelligence known as the Thumb. A Hand consists of one Coordinator and three Agents. While Coordinators tend to originate in the 40th century or later, Agents are recruited throughout time.

The members of Delta Hand 28 are Khanor Rhi, its coordinator, a former chronoprogrammer from the 40th century, the beautiful Varna Zelton, a timsensitive and former student of Khanor, and Spell. In the first series, the fourth member was Rock Klammers, who tried to kill Adolf Hitler, but his memory was erased and he was returned to his own time. He was replaced in the second series by Minus-3, an augmented ape. The first series of stories involved various missions through time, ending with a nuclear explosion that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. In the second series, the heroes discovered that the Brigade had been founded and was secretly controlled by a hidden group of immortals, inheritors of the science of Mû, the legendary fifth planet destroyed c. 65 million years BC. They tried to prevent the destruction of Mû by a lethal civil war, but failed.

Brigade Temporelle was serialized in Futura Nos. 1-10 and Nos. 19-26 in 1972-74. The characters returned in 2001 and 2002 a number of short stories written by Jean-Marc Lofficier and drawn by Timothy Green II. A 46-page graphic novel by the same team subtitled  La Guerre du Graal [The Grail War] was then released in 2005.

Brigade Temporelle is now part of Hexagon Comics which plans to publish collections of their adventures translated into English.