Paradox

There is a boy who is his own father—and if he can’t stop himself, the paradox that created him will tear reality apart. That’s the dizzying, deeply human engine of Paradox, the acclaimed 28-page sci-fi one-shot from Phillip Sevy, the cartoonist behind Dark Horse’s Triage and the Paste Magazine-approved horror series The House.

Intercut between multiple time periods, Paradox follows a young man racing to prevent the very paradox that brought him into existence. It’s a classic bootstrap conundrum in the tradition of Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” and Predestination—but Sevy builds it with an unexpected warmth. The story moves between a sunlit, present-day San Francisco and an apocalyptic future of rubble and broken bridges, with Sevy’s color palette kept deliberately distinct across timelines until the moment they begin to converge. What starts as a brain-teaser about a time traveler who is destined to conceive himself deepens into something far more personal: an aching meditation on fathers and sons, the sacrifices parenthood demands, and what it means to become the parent you once struggled to understand. Sevy has said that as he wrote and drew the book, it became “much more personal” than the clever sci-fi premise he started with—a story drawn from lived experience.

Written, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered entirely by Sevy, Paradox was completed at the end of 2016 and first reached readers free, serialized one page at a time on Tumblr beginning in January 2017—coverage that The Beat highlighted in its “year of free comics” series. A successful Kickstarter campaign brought it to print, and after it became a sleeper hit in the indie scene, Source Point Press re-released the one-shot to comic shops on January 29, 2020. The striking logo and cover design came courtesy of designer-writer Tim Daniel, the visual branding lead at Vault Comics.

Critics took notice. Villain Media called Paradox “an inventive and emotionally moving time-travel tale” and “exceptional in story and art,” praising how Sevy’s lettering keeps its nonlinear structure readable without blunting the trippier edges of time travel. Sevy himself unpacked the story’s Oedipal conceit—and its deeply personal themes of fatherhood—in a candid essay for Bleeding Cool.

The entire story is still free to read on Sevy’s official Paradox Tumblr, and the print one-shot is available from Midtown Comics and comic shops everywhere. Perfect for fans of Triage, bootstrap-paradox sci-fi like Predestination, and emotionally charged father-son stories that hide a heart inside a head-scratcher.