The Manhattan Projects vol. 1: Science. Bad.

I wasn’t planning on turning this into “Jonathan Hickman Week” around here, but that’s how things wound up being shipped to me.  While I have one more Ultimate title of his to talk about tomorrow, and even taking into account how much I enjoyed “Ultimate Comics Ultimates,” this is the one you should shell out your hard earned money to buy now.  A work of “alternate history” that gleefully disregards any pretense of accurately portraying the time, place or people, “The Manhattan Projects” shows you that in the right hands “bad science” can be a great deal of fun.

In real life, Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, and Harry Daghlian were part of the Manhattan Project that developed the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan to end WWII in 1945.  That’s where the similarities with this story end, because the business with the atomic bomb was just a front for the many, many scientific avenues being pursued as part of the “Manhattan Projects.”  To say that the characters involved don’t resemble their real-life counterparts either… well, Feynman has been reinvented as a naive, almost childish do-gooder while his peers are either no longer human, never were human, or not who they appear.  The fact that Wernher Von Braun now has a robot arm, it just makes him one of the more normal ones.

Freed from the constraints of mainstream superhero comics, Hickman lets his freak flag fly and gives us some of the most demented scenes and ideas you’ll see all year.  The first issue alone features a Japanese attack on the Projects’ main base via Death Torii and twelve-horsepower Kamikaze Killing Machines.  Subsequent issues feature Death Buddhas, Harry Truman:  Freemason, the death and repurposing of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and alien genocide.  The series keeps getting weirder and wilder throughout the five issues collected here, and that’s a very good thing.

Of course, the problem with that approach is you’re eventually going to hit a point of diminishing returns.  “Style over substance” hasn’t been shown to sustain an ongoing series indefinitely, but Hickman sets up a wealth of potential to be explored here.  The… “situations” regarding Oppenheimer and Einstein are clearly key threads for this series, and Feynman clearly going to be a factor in at least one of them.  Throw in the extraterrestrial concerns and you’ve got something that could go on for quite a while — market willing.

It is, however, hard to pin down exactly what this series is about.  While the idea of “the real story behind the Manhattan Project” makes for a nice soundbite, it’s so vague as to give you no clue as to its direction.  You could say that it’s gearing up to be a cautionary tale about the pursuit of science for science’s sake, but the book’s approach steamrollers right past the very notion of “caution” in this world.  If you’ve ever seen a scientist in a movie proposing an idea that seems destined to go wrong, this is the kind of book that would take that idea and hook it up to the nearest fusion reactor to see what happens.  I like that kind of thinking and I want to see where it leads.

Hickman is joined by his “Red Wing” collaborator Nick Pitarra and the man still has a whole lot of Frank Quitely in his style.  Primarily in the detail and squiggly lines, which I admit are an acquired taste, but his linework is much thicker and the characters come off as bigger and more imposing on the page.  For a book that traffics in larger-than-life personas, this is a plus.  Pitarra also proves that, much like Guy Davis did during his tenure on “B.P.R.D.,” he can draw pretty much everything from nerdy aliens, to German castles under siege, and one man’s army of multiple personalities.  He’s a great fit for the material and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he gets to draw next.

This first volume of “The Manhattan Projects” is a great start to Hickman’s first ongoing creator-owned series.  Much as I’ve enjoyed his work at Marvel, it’s still more fun to see his sensibilities completely unfiltered here.  There is the chance it could just be an ongoing parade of weirdness with no depth to back it up, but that’s the future and right now we’ve got a great comic.