Next Men
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John Byrne's Next Men (also simply Next Men or JBNM) is a comic book series written and drawn by John Byrne. It ran 31 issues (#0-30) plus a standalone prequel, 2112. The series was published between 1991 and 1995 by Dark Horse Comics.
Synopsis
In the 1950s, an explosion in Alaska draws the attention of a group of scientists. There they discover dozens of charred bodies - and one live one in an exoskeleton. The survivor, Sathanas, kills all but one scientist, whom he uses to meet Senator Aldus Hilltop. Together - with Sathanas' existence kept secret - they construct Project Next Men, which creates batches of superhumans who are raised in a virtual reality.
In the early 1990s, five of these Next Men manage to escape from confinement, but once free they find that their powers are very different than they were in their virtual world. The Next Men are:
- Nathan, whose mutated eyes are large and black and allow him to see a wide spectrum of light
- Jasmine, a young super-acrobat
- Jack, who is super-strong but cannot control his strength
- Bethany, who is invulnerable to harm, but who loses physical sensation and whose skin bleaches white
- Danny, who can run at superhuman speeds
The Next Men are eventually rescued by a man called Control and his secret government organization, even as Hilltop rises to the Vice Presidency and then the Presidency. The Next Men explore the ramifications of their existence even as they turn out to be cogs in Sathanas' decades-long master plan, a story involving time travel, eugenics and doppelgängers.
Notes
Along with its late-1980s/early-1990s contemporaries such as Watchmen, JBNM was a deconstruction of the superhero genre, positing a world with nascent superhumans and considering how they would impact the world in fairly realistic terms, for the genre.
The series ended with a cliffhanger in #30. Byrne had intended to conclude the story in a second series, but the collapse of the American comic book industry in the mid-1990s made it financially unfeasible for him to do so, and he returned to working for hire at DC Comics and Marvel Comics. As of 2005 it is not known whether the Next Men story will ever be concluded.
Collections
JBNM has been collected as a set of graphic novels:
- 2112
- Book One
- Parallels
- Fame
- Faith
- Power
- Lies