• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Comic Book Herald

A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans

  • Reading Orders
    • Marvel
    • My Marvelous Year
    • DC Comics
    • All Comic Book Publishers
    • Most Recent
  • Beginner Guides
    • Beginner’s Guide To Comics In 2023
    • Marvel 2023: Where to Start?
    • DC 2023: Where to Start?
    • Best of Lists
    • Tablets for Comics
    • Guides for Digital Readers
  • Reviews
    • Marvel Comics
    • DC Comics
    • Comic Book Movies
    • Comic Book TV
    • Video Games
  • Podcasts & Video
    • My Marvelous Year
    • Best Comics Ever (CBH)
    • CBH on Youtube!
  • About Me
    • My Favorite Comics of All Time
    • Columns
    • CBH Email Newsletter
  • Support Comic Book Herald
    • Ways to support
You are here: Home / Featured / Hickmania 3.1: On The Matter of “Transhuman”

Hickmania 3.1: On The Matter of “Transhuman”

March 23, 2022 by David Mann Leave a Comment

Trigger warning: Discussion of sexual assault.

2008’s Transhuman is one of the more difficult books in Jonathan Hickman’s backlog to evenhandedly discuss. This isn’t due to enormous storytelling or thematic complexity, or that the premise inherently incites controversy in the same fashion as his inaugural Nightly News. No, it’s simply because the entire story pivots around a gag about bestiality gang rape. There is no downplaying that. It’s three issues of buildup to that punchline and a chunk of the last issue is spent chuckling over the assorted humiliating fates of the victims. One has to hope Hickman’s gained more than an ounce of taste and perspective in the roughly decade-and-a-half since this, but it’s almost surely the vilest thing he’s ever penned. It is, on that basis alone, impossible to recommend.

The difficulty with this is it’s also one of the most significant pieces of his early career, as a massive conceptual antecedent to some of his most prominent and wildly successful later output. For perspective on the man’s work, it’s as indispensable as it is indefensible.

Previously: Past episodes of Hickmania

Hickmania on Youtube

Support For Comic Book Herald:

Comic Book Herald is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a qualifying affiliate commission.

Comic Book Herald’s reading orders and guides are also made possible by reader support on Patreon, and generous reader donations.

Any size contribution will help keep CBH alive and full of new comics guides and content. Support CBH on Patreon for exclusive rewards, or Donate here! Thank you for reading!

The premise: a documentary interviewing the principal figures – from the scientists and managers to the test subjects and money men – behind the formation and development of the companies competing to bring superpowers to the world via bionics or genetic engineering. It’s diagrams and monologues and brutal gags and ‘superheroes’ and the wheel of society in the hands of Great Men’s egos; as tight a bundling of Hickman’s pet interests as anything he’s ever written. They’re also all subjects artist JM Ringuet is well-equipped to tackle: this is an ugly comic book, angular sneering creeps set against a palette of shit-browns, snot-yellows, and spackles of black like a layer of grime over the world or, given the premise, the degradation on worn-down old film.

It is a story about cruel old bastards ruining each other, sometimes for the right to run the world but mostly to prove that they can, and how nothing will ever get any better in any way that matters because we’re seemingly hardwired to hurt one another for a leg up. Naturally this fits with it being a story about capitalism, and in that regard it boils the metaphor of superpowers down to its purest state: who gets to make things happen.

Super-strength and speed and flight are nifty, but even the people inventing those have to beg and scrape for the favor of men in nice suits. Being tough or clever only benefits anyone when they’re also ruthless and lucky enough to use those traits to get the one real superpower – others hopping when they demand it. It’s why superheroes in here, the people who can do something wondrous because they let others tinker with them for one small reason or another, are nothing but a trumped-up marketing gimmick (one ending in PR disaster with the aforementioned assault). That dream of protection and personal advancement and justice matters about as much in this context as these people do to Apple:

This is a fascinating framing in retrospect, because Hickman’s most direct subsequent tackling of these ideas would be in the form of his wildly successful revamp of the X-Men franchise. Even aside from half of the test monkeys in Transhuman being riffs on members of the team, both involve a ‘war’ between mutated humans and machinekind for control of the future, a pharmaceutical miracle pitch to the world, the prospect of immortality, and an isolated land for humanity’s inheritors. It’s telling in this lens that one of the reveals of Hickman’s X-Men run is that the formal team by the name had been quietly disbanded. To tackle the ideas of his preceding work, Hickman sees the mutants abandon their roles of superheroes as we understand them in favor of softer yet truer power as politicians, spymasters, ambassadors, spiritual leaders, living ‘machines’ keeping society functioning, and captains of industry. The ever-lingering question is if their new dream of achieving liberation through hegemony can possibly end well.

The X-Men line of titles under his initial stewardship ultimately grew substantially beyond Jonathan Hickman and his plans, leading to his amicable departure, so it can’t be said for sure what his initial answer may have been. Transhuman would seem to suggest however that it may have been ‘of course not’. The conclusion of the book with humanity achieving immortality literally comes at the expense of the ability to progress any further. Admittedly, it’s a notion of a late-stage capitalist end of the world that somehow isn’t quite apocalyptic enough, a mere enervating stasis rather than collapse, tellingly written as it was prior to the height of the 2008 financial crisis. But the narrator’s declaration “You could have flown” holds the same weight regardless: the tools were all there to make a better world. We chose what we chose instead, the ‘winners’ and the losers and those just trying to get by, because it’s all humans ever could.

Filed Under: Featured, Reviews Tagged With: hickmania

Heroically Support Comic Book Herald!

If you like Comic Book Herald, and are able to donate, any small contribution will help keep CBH alive and full of new comics guides and content. Donate here! Or, support CBH on Patreon for exclusive rewards! Thank you for reading!

Become a Patron!

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

The Comic Book Herald Podcast!

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsRSS
My Marvelous Year reading club helps Marvel fans become comic book experts

Recent Posts

  • DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part II January 28, 2023
  • Sins of Sinister! | Comic Book Herald Live! January 27, 2023
  • Spawn Reading Order! January 24, 2023
  • 2001 Pt. 3: Daredevil Yellow & Bendis’ Daredevil! January 23, 2023
  • DC and The Matter of Crisis, Part I January 21, 2023
  • Immortal X-Men #10!!! Hell Yeah, What a TWIST! | Comic Book Herald Live! January 20, 2023
  • Knights of X #1-5 in Review January 19, 2023
  • 2001 Variant A: Most Consistent Marvel & DC Titles, Zack’s Facts, & French Comics! January 16, 2023
  • The Nine Major Modes Of The Big DC Story January 14, 2023
  • X-Men: Red #10 Review – Evil in Spades January 13, 2023
  • X-Men #18, Legion of X #9, & Dark Web Tie-Ins | Comic Book Herald Live! January 13, 2023
  • Who Watched the Watchmen? Justice League Unlimited January 12, 2023
  • Where to Start With Marvel Comics In 2023? January 11, 2023
  • Ed Brubaker on Batman: Caped Crusader, Streaming Comics, & Comics Adaptations! January 10, 2023
  • 2001 Pt. 2: X-Force, Exiles & Xtreme Claremont! January 9, 2023

Popular Articles

DC Rebirth Guide

Batman Reading Order

DC New 52 Reading Order

Marvel Ultimate Universe Guide

Civil War Reading Order

Marvel Cosmic Reading Order

The Best Comics of All Time!

Deadpool Reading Order

Justice League Reading Order

Complete Thanos Reading Order

X-Men Reading Guide (Modern Era)

Age of Apocalypse Reading Order

Modern Marvel Universe in 25 Trades

Best Tablet For Digital Comics

Is Marvel Unlimited Worth It?

Footer

New to Comic Book Herald?

Hey there - my name's Dave and this is my comic book blog. It's my way of sharing my borderline obsessive addiction to the comic book medium, and I hope you like some of what's going on here.

Most people that come here are looking for my (WIP) Marvel reading order guide. You can probably also get a sense if CBH is for you by taking a look at some of my columns.

If you like what you see, let's connect on Facebook or Twitter. Or, leave a comment on the blog here, I'm always looking for new awesome people in the comic book community.

More on Comic Book Herald

  • Home
  • About
  • Support CBH
  • My Marvelous Year
  • Join!
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service

Recent Posts

  • DC and The Matter Of Crisis, Part II
  • Sins of Sinister! | Comic Book Herald Live!
  • Spawn Reading Order!
  • 2001 Pt. 3: Daredevil Yellow & Bendis’ Daredevil!
  • DC and The Matter of Crisis, Part I

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in