Foreword Note: This previous Secant of Dresden Codak may be of use for readers who missed my previous review and who are unfamiliar with the comic.

While it may be a mistake to assign labels such as “hero” or “villain” to the characters in Dresden Codak (even though Kimiko’s friends, Dimitri and Alina, possess abilities that could easily be considered “heroic” in nature even if their manifestations are pseudo-scientific in form), in many ways Kim straddles the border between anti-hero and villain. Part of this lies with her cold disregard for human life (and indeed for anyone outside of herself)… a disregard that worries both Dimitri and Alina. But it is with the ending of the threat of Hob, and the wrapping up of the Time Travelers story that we learn a bit more of what motivates Kim… with her shouting after Dimitri that all humans ever do is die. Or leave.

With Dimitri’s own comments about how hiding from problems runs in Kim’s family (and Kim’s own aversion to talking about her father), it seems probable that her mother died… and her father then abandoned her, perhaps out of his own grief or inability to cope. The funny thing is, Kim may have been right all along. The Time Travelers were not harmed by the robot Hob… indeed, one Traveler had his blindness cured by Hob with a blast of green light just moments before the Travelers struck him down.

Keeping with the theme of Kim as anti-hero, it is Kim herself who causes the most harm to the Travelers, by striking one across the back of his head with a rock… which is almost amusing when you consider Kim’s attraction to high technology. The twist in the story lies with a bullet fired from a Chekhov’s pistol several comics back, though I suspect the mini-Hob will not be nearly the threat that his larger self had been. Were the Time Travelers wrong about Hob, and indeed about the technology they fear? Or was Hob benign, and a victim of rampant technophobia? Ultimately, we’re left to decide that for ourselves. But that is Dresden Codak’s greatest aspect – how it gets its readers to think rather than merely react.