NEXT MEN

John Byrne’s Next Men is back. Byrne produced 31 issues of this title title from February 1992 to December 1994 and then said he was taking a few months off. He was emotionally exhausted, he said, and needed a change. So he was going to abandon comics for a while to work on a novel and a couple of other projects. Then he’d come roaring back, tossing his characters into “a whole new mess.”

But Byrne took 16 years off, and now he’s back with his team of super-powered beings who were concocted at a place called “the Greenery,” an idyllic sort of scientific Garden of Eden (the first of several Biblical allusions insinuated into the stories). Nathan, who can see through things, is called Scanner; Jack, the strong man, is Brawn; Bethany, who is indestructible, is Hardbody; Danny, who can run faster than anything, is Sprint; and Jasmine (“Jazz”), whose acrobatics defy gravity, is Bounce. Ever since leaving the Greenery, led by a government agent, an African American woman named Tony Murcheson, they’ve been living in a nightmare of menace as various personages, chiefly a criminally inclined former senator (eventually Prez of the U.S.) Aldus Hilltop, who also initiated the experiment that resulted in the creation of the Next Men, sought to enlist their abilities in sundry plots and schemes. Besides Hilltop, there’s a comic book publisher, Dollar Comics, who wants the Next Men to act as shills for its comics. Eventually, they’re all accused of being murderers.

Byrne is one of the most talented creators to work in comic books: he is, first of all, a cartoonist, which means he writes as well as draws his stories. He has a special feeling for science fiction and its associated fantasies, which he evolves in the most grown-up themes. Such as, f’instance — the Next Men were created by activating a “trigger gene” found in all humans; it propelled them to the “next” level of human evolution — hence the name. The dilemmas into which Byrne thrusts his Next Men are not the slam-bang sort that infect the pages of Marvel and DC funnybooks: Byrne’s superheroes are plagued by more sophisticated threats, and they extricate themselves more by intellectual means than physical.

The original series was branded for “Mature Readers,” and it lived up to the brand: the books display some nudity (even male frontal nudity) and some of the characters engage in sexual intercourse, which they originally, while in the Greenery, called “dancing,” betraying a childlike naivety that subsequently gets both Danny and Jasmine in trouble. All achieved in tasteful sequences: nothing salacious, kimo sabe.

More details can be mined at the Usual Place, R&R, Op. 274.