Broken Frontier

The fan fave supporting crew from Swamp Thing return, with their own town, their own political intrigue, their own murder mystery, and a new would-be hero.

Picking up a few generations after the crooked-continuity of the American Freak mini-series, The Un-Men explores an infant town called Aberrance, U.S.A., a municipality made by freaks, for freaks. Aberrance is a place culled from the remains of an ex-military nuclear settlement, a land awarded to head Un-Man Damien Kane, after he exposed the army’s treatment of his fellow oddities to the world. Now – their township established and an Un-Men hierarchy of power firmly entrenched – a bizarre murder of a seemingly insignificant freak will lead an albino named Kilcrop, an agent working for the U.S. Department of Energy, on a quest to uncover the deepest secrets of Aberrance, U.S.A.’s present designs.

Relative newcomer John Whalen cracks his knuckles and cooks up a meaty, multi-course first issue, chock-full of new characters, noir-ish plots, and ladled with a healthy spooning of B-movie eccentricity. There’s a whirlwind of activity within, and yet, sadly, it’s not enough to gauge the overall direction of the book. The characters are well imagined, some freakish in satisfactorily classic ways, some wildly envisaged, fulfilling both expectations that come with a book concerning such characters. The joy of this new iteration of Un-Men is that only half the characters are naturally born disfigured, the other half being medically altered by near-mythical means, so that the type and tenor of their possible permutations are sky’s-the-limit.

Beyond its basic structure, however, Whalen’s story is an intriguing one, certainly a well-told first chapter, and more than enough to compel a return for round two. His hero, Agent Kilcrop, is sweetly placed as a middle-man, a somewhat-freak, a rare breed that nevertheless is acceptable to "normal" society. The character arc, then, seems to concern itself with Kilcrop’s finding placement between two extremes of peoples, neither of which wholly accept him as their own. Around this, runs a straightforward conspiracy yarn, about murder and motive and the usual mystery tropes.

Putting it all on paper is Mike Hawthorne, a guy best known for his runs on The Exterminators, Queen and Country, and his own series of Oni original GN’s, Hysteria. Hawthorne’s style is that of an accomplished cartoonist, a little Frank Cho mixed with Rick Burchett. He pencils a mean freak, be it guy or gal, though nothing flashy; he’s an artist that knows how to tell a story, and how to cram twelve panels into a single page and make it seem as if there were only four or five. The Un-Men is a smooth read thanks to his talent, as Whalen’s script indeed calls for page after page that spares no space for anything besides background information and constant progression of plot.

So a very good, very expert first issue, if still, for all of that, just a first issue. This’ll be a tough one to sell as an ongoing saga, as the characters, for all their whimsy, are going to require a status that surpasses their quo as neat-o freaks, and do so fairly quickly. It’s a balancing act of cool qualities vs. dramatic qualities, and whether Whalen can offer both, side-by-side, without sacrificing really any of either. As it stands, The Un-Men offers characters that work with the plot, and a setting that’s well worth exploring, but it’ll additionally require a bulkhead cast that can grow to be more important than either the book’s intrigue or freak-factor. Most books never achieve this, so it’s a tall order, but seeing as this is a Vertigo book, it’s got a better chance than most, so I’ll be sticking around to find out.