Comic Book Review: The Hypernaturals Volume One written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
In the far future, humans have spread across the galaxy thanks to the Trip System that allows near-instantaneous teleportation across galactic distances. Artificial intelligence has also reached a singularity point where it essentially runs civilization, so the dating system has reset, and it is now the year 100 AQ (Anno Quantinuum.) Still, problems arise, and a team of superhumans called The Hypernaturals are there to deal with them.
The entire 21st iteration of the team goes missing on their first mission, presumed dead. Since they were just put into action, there is no full replacement team set up. Instead, three retired veterans of the team are forced into action, speedster Bewilder, genius Thinkwell, and Hatch Groman, formerly supersoldier Clone45 until his powers passed on to the missing Clone46. Two rookies are called in, the naive Strangelet who wields “quantum particles”, and a new wearer of the Halfshell power armor, who has some problems with authority.
It’s quickly evident that the person responsible is Sublime, a malevolent hypergenius surpassing even Thinkwell, who wants to destroy the Quantinuum to “restore humanity’s freedom.” But he’s been trapped in isolation for the last seven years, so how did he do it?
Abnett & Lanning did a run of the Legion of Super-Heroes a while back, and you can see a bit of that in here, but it’s different enough to stand on its own. One of the obvious choices is that this universe has no known living intelligent aliens. While some of the characters look odd, everyone’s descended from Earth humans. This may be important later. This volume contains the Free Comic Book Day preview, and the first three issues of the miniseries.
Art is primarily by Tom Derenick, Brad Walker and Andres Guinaldo, who seem to have swapped off who’d be lead artist for any given issue. They’re all quite competent and the book still looks coherent.
These first few issues introduce the characters, establish some conflicts, and set up plot points for later. For example, it’s not clear how many, if any of the Centennial Iteration of the Hypernaturals are actually dead–there’s hints that at least two survived in some way. And whether Sublime is actually behind their disappearance or someone is framing him…somehow.
Sublime himself is one of those characters who might just possibly have a valid point, but since he’s willing to kill billions of people to get his way, and is gratuitously cruel, falls solidly into the supervillain category.
One of the more interesting things about the setting is “pattern regression.” Because of how the Trip system works, a person can be “restored” to a version of their Pattern from a previous use of the system, losing any memories or injuries accumulated during the interim. This is sometimes used on criminals to send them back to a point in their lives before they made poor life choices. And a background character had this done to him by Sublime, restoring him to the earliest saved version in infancy and somehow removing all later saves. Sublime himself, of course, is immune to the effect.
The least appealing thing about the series in these early issues is the costume design of Halfshell. In universe, it’s the product of a company that is more concerned about making her look like eye candy than practicality.
There’s enough here to make me want to find out more about the characters and the world, so I look forward to Volume Two.
