The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

The superhero business is really all about big business.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admit that Jonathan Hickman has an interesting approach as a story teller. The Nightly News introduced him as someone who approached storytelling from a different perspective than your standard comic book writer. Through graphic design, he produced something that looked more like a slick news magazine or even USA’s mcnuggets of news. It was unique and novel and really stood out. Transhuman, written by Hickman and drawn by JM Ringuet, continues to show this different approach as Hickman and Ringuet tell of the rise of super humans as a television documentary, complete with interviews of key people in the movement. Issue #1 is the beginning of a fascinating story but I’m stuck wondering if it is really a good comic book?

The Transhuman movement as shown here resembles something more like Apple or Google than The Avengers or The Teen Titans. In this book, super powers aren’t about changing the world or bettering mankind; it’s about money and who can win the Transhuman race as Hickman and Ringuet show the development of two companies with two different approaches to developing super powers. One believes in developing genetic advancements while the other is trying to build a better human through cybernetics. At the core of the race is a dissolved marriage that fuels two people’s ambition and drive. Hickman builds the story up through interviews with other key figures in the Transhuman movement, including the scientists and the dreamers who started the whole thing and the test subjects who eventually want to be something more than they really are.

The problem with this first issue of Transhuman is that there’s very little here that relies on the comic book form. It’s an illustrated documentary but it rarely relies on being a comic book. Maybe that will change if this title moves away from being about business to being about super-powered. This story could easily have been told in a couple of different formats such as prose or video that it’s difficult to say at this point that this is a good comic. It’s certainly an entertaining story but it’s not a great comic book.

Transhuman #1
“Discovery”
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
Art by: RM Ringuet

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