Every once in a while I step back and say to myself, why are there so many people reading superhero books (which can be brilliant, but medicore just as often) when they could be digesting genius like Image Comics’ NOWHERE MEN?
The third issue of this spectacular Sci-Fi soup of weirdness came out this week and served to convince me that, as the book has said many times, “Science IS the new rock and roll.” There is a Scientific Fab Four: Simon Grimshaw, Emerson Strange, Thomas Walker, and Dade Ellis. They forge “WorldCorp”, a titan in both innovation and shady testing sequences over the years whose inventions consist of everything from artificial intelligence to elevated means of transportation.
Not everything is what it seems. There have been “test subjects” dying of a virus on a space station who have now teleported to various locations and have no idea how to get anywhere. A man who looked a lot like a giant scab in the previous issue has morphed into total badass territory, ripping engines out of cars and appearing like Hellboy, Red Skull, and a dinosaur all gave him their extra DNA. And in a book like this, who knows? Maybe WorldCorp takes alternate universe gene donors.
What’s great about NOWHERE MEN is that it’s not just a visual narrative. This is total world-building. There are fake advertisements, interviews, articles, and other supplementary materials. Turn the page and you’re staring at a WorldCorp promotion. It’s like a multimedia avalanche—a scientific PowerPoint presentation, even.
With this one, you never know what’s around the next corner—except that it’ll be gloriously rendered by Nate Bellegarde and starkly colored by Jordie Bellaire, a couple of artistic “belles” of the virtual ball, and told in astonishing detail by Image’s Publisher, Eric Stephenson. Somebody get this team on more books, stat. And somebody slap people upside the head who automatically head for the same old characters over great material like this.
