Comic Review: The Hypernaturals, Issues 1 & 2

The Hypernaturals #1.  From left to right:
Clone 45, Thinkwell, and Bewilder.

The Hypernaturals is a new sci fi/superhero series by former Guardians of the Galaxy scribes Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, published by Boom! Studios.  Boom! is an at-best mid-sized publisher more well-known for the licensed properties than for their original or creator-owned work, but Abnett and Lanning have enough name cache that this series has gotten a ton of publicity in the online comics’ press, and indeed, I’ve seen the first two issues reviewed several places, including Newsrama and Major Spoilers.  That said, I was personally planning to give the series a pass—indie superheroes are not normally my thing—until I started reading Dan Abnett’s first Warhammer 40K omnibus, The Founding.  I ordered The Founding off of Amazon before I realized that it was a Warhammer product, and I’ll be honest, when I finally got the book—and got a good look at it—I groaned.  In fact, I almost sent it back.  But then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I’d ordered The Founding because it was an almost universally acknowledged five-star book according to Amazon’s online reviewers, so what with the fact that it was already at my house and all, I felt like I might as well give it a try.  And as it happens, The Founding has been excellent so far.  So now, having seen what Abnett could do by himself with something as uninspiring as Warhammer genre-fiction, I decided I ought to at least see what he and his comic-partner Andy Lanning could do with a completely blank slate and unlimited room to run.

The ode to mindless modern fame-seeking is
awesome.  But what is that thing on her head?

The Hypernaturals might be superhero sci fi, but it’s not at all similar to the Guardians of Galaxy.  Instead, it starts more like American Idol-meets-the-Avengers, where our heroes are not only, ahem, the guardians of the galaxy, they’re also pop icons chosen via highly publicized public tryout.  Next to that, the sci fi elements of this story are just gravy.  Yes, we get a worlds-spanning super computer network that essentially runs human society, plenty of gratuitous teleportation, and a genius bad guy who’s determined to shake up the status quo, but truth be told, this is a story that could easily have been set in a contemporary reality.  The fact that it’s focused so closely on the value and price of celebrity—and on the desire of most common people to attain fame without their ever having the first clue what that fame is actually going to entail—says far more about society today than it does about any potential future that we might have.  Moreover, the story succeeds because it correctly captures the complacency that I think most Americans feel right now, today, in their day-to-day lives.  In our story, the heroes are hit by a devastating loss.  For the public outside the immediate team, however, the issues remain totally superficial, even after the crisis.  Who’s sleeping with whom, and who do we blame?  Never mind the fact that the very underpinnings of their world are at real risk.

Where The Hypernaturals falls apart a little is in the art.  The linework is okay, but on the printed page I thought it looked a little pixilated—almost like they couldn’t quite get 300 dpi resolution artwork at press time, so rather than wasting time trying to recover lost files, they just went to press with the 150 dpi pages that they had on hand.  I say that because I bought Issue #1 on my phone and thought it looked great.  But then I bought Issue #2 in hardcopy and thought it looked a little jagged.  And then, too, while I liked the energy and the motion in the art, I wasn’t crazy about some of the character designs.  The creepier characters like Thinkwell came out nicely, but the ones who’re supposed to be more paragons of humanity—Bewilder and Clone 45—just didn’t do it for me.  I kept wondering what that thing was on Bewilder’s head, and Clone 45, well, he just looked like a long-haired linebacker with laser guns to me.

It's a terrific design for Thinkwell.  The dialogue here reminded me a bit of
some of the Warhammer 40K stuff for which Dan Abnett is justifiably famous. 

Even with those reservations about the art, however, I’m still gonna keep buying this series.  Not only is it an interesting idea, it’s also a mystery—a mystery that’s succeeded in making me wonder what the Hell is really going on.  Moreover, I’m curious to see where our fearless scribes are heading.  They’ve given themselves a lot of room to run here and a lot of potential hooks on which to build.  What I want to see is how they’re gonna play off some of the angles and what’s gonna prove to be important.  There’s a lot here.  Plus, there just aren’t enough sci fi comics on the market these days, and most of what is on the market is based on some kind of licensed property.  That makes original ideas like The Hypernaturals in short supply.  That by itself is reason enough to see where it’s going if you ask me.  In fact, I recommend The Hypernaturals strongly to anybody who likes sci fi but wants to see it go some place different than a galaxy far, far away.  Not only is this a story that starts in a world that we can recognize in relation to our own, it’s also a story that’s headed in a place that at this point we can’t yet begin to imagine.