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By Jason Bourgeois
Okay, screw the big two. I don't get a chance to talk about the smaller publishers enough. Mainly because budgetary reasons keep me from buying too many books outside of Marvel and DC these days. Still, there's a few I get, and they very often are overlooked. Partly for the same reasons I skip them, partly because of, why would I want to read book Z when book A from Marvel does the same thing? Still, there's stuff out there worth talking about.
Boom! Studios is easily one of the top independent publishers these days, and I've talked about them before. They did the excellent Cthulhu comics a few years ago that I quite enjoyed. There were flaws, but I digress. This is not Cthulhu time.
Boom! has made a reputation for doing licensed comics, but they have their fair share of original works, now that they have a reputation. One of their recent works is Hypernaturals, by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. Longtime comic fans, and fans of this column, should recognise those names from a number of places; they created Resurrection Man, for starters. But I bet most people will remember them from a five year long run DC's Legion of Super-Heroes and Legionnaires comics.
Which is appropriate, because Hypernaturals shares a lot of DNA with the Legion. I tried out the book as a zero issue last Free Comic Book Day, and while it didn't immediately grab me, there were enough interesting ideas and concepts, and Abnett & Lanning had enough credit with me to give it a more in depth look. It can be hard to sell your ideas in a short, free comic, so it did what it needed to do, but not blow me away.
The comic is about a superhero team in the distant future. The singularity has come and gone, the human race has expanded across the cosmos. They've created stargate travel. The technology is so far beyond anything we could even imagine, it hurts me to think about. Everything is run by a massive supercomputer, that is so powerful that name doesn't even do it justice. The Hypernaturals are the team that has been put together to police the planets, and work as a public relations arm for the Quantinuum, the new face of humanity.
Every few years, a new team of Hypernaturals is chosen to represent the galactic races, and the old members, those that survive, move on to other things. You get a hint of life after being a superhero, as well as what it's like to exist in this brave new universe.
Things go spectacularly wrong though, as they must, when the 21st iteration of the Hypernaturals is seemingly destroyed on their first mission. A new team of substitute members and old members is hastily assembled to try and keep things from spinning off the rails, as well as figure out what happened.
As they explore the mysteries of the 21st team, we learn more and more about this strange future, the way things work, and it all comes out very naturally through our characters just encountering new things we experience, or in flashbacks to past missions of other Hypernaturals that are pertinent to the current happenings.
Much like the zero issue, the main series was a little slow going at first, but the ideas were big, the universe was intriguing enough, and the creators still had that past body of work that impressed me enough. But eventually, the scifi, and this is some deep, hard scifi here, people. They get into some big ideas that are amazing, and I was just blown away at how damned creative it all was, sparking ideas of my own, and making for a unique universe that I wanted to read more about.
It took awhile to get there, but Hypernaturals became a must read, once I got sucked into this universe, and don't want to leave. Yes, you can all see how this is similar to the Legion, and even some characters seem like Legionnaires with the serial numbers filed off. I mean, Thinkwell is clearly Brainiac 5 with more people skills. But they're original enough in their own rights that I don't care.
If you're a fan of hard, yet action oriented science fiction, Abnett & Lanning in general, or their Legion work in specific, I cannot recommend this book more highly. I love me a good scifi epic with wild ideas that seem based in real science, I love superheroes, and this is just such a unique treat, with familiar tropes, that you are missing out if you're not reading it.
Jason M. Bourgeois
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