The Hive is a crime thriller with a science fiction twist. Certain individuals in the story are able to control the thoughts and actions of others by getting inside their minds through a process called “hiving”. “Everyone has an innate frequency”, explains one of the characters. “We’re able to affect the air around people, creating vibrational anomalies that we can manipulate, direct.” Essentially it’s much the same as the Bene Gesserit “voice” in Dune – and, like the Bene Gesserit voice, it’s the tip of a secret-cult iceberg. Those with the gift of hiving are organised into crime syndicates called hives, which are ruled over by super-powerful female mind-manipulators called queens.
If you think this means that The Hive is going to show us the criminal underworld from a female point of view rather than a male one, then you’re in for a slight disappointment. The main hive in the story is headed by a lady called Shay, and there are plenty of other sassy-and-bad female characters, but the chief protagonist is a down-on-his-luck ex-cop called Mason. Unbeknown to himself, Mason has hiving powers (he’s a “drone”), and once he’s “discovered” by operatives from the hive, and starts to learn how to use his gift, he turns out to be “stronger than anyone we’ve seen”.
We’ve seen stories of this type before, of course. An apparently-lowly character gradually turns out to be endowed with superpowers – in fact turns out to be the chosen one, the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy, the one on whom the fate of the world or universe may depend, etc etc. Think Harry Potter, Lyra in His Dark Materials, Paul Atreides in Dune…
The artwork by Mike Henderson is extremely hard-edged and slick. There are numerous filmic devices: tilted angles, overhead shots, long shots, moody silhouettes. The men are chiselled and muscular, the women are super-pneumatic and nearly as muscular, and it can sometimes be a little bit difficult to tell the characters apart, especially as the narrative tends to cut from one strand of the story to another without warning.
The story is throat-grabbingly propulsive and super-complicated, with oodles of ultra-violence and sex. “Sex – Violence – Bees” it says on the back of the book, and that’s pretty much what we get.
We start in the middle of the story – in fact in the middle of a gory showdown. Within the first few frames somebody gets killed by a nail in the head. Then we flash back to three months earlier, and the flashback section starts with an orgy.
Then there’s a heist, involving a truck being forced off a freeway, but when the back of the truck is opened, it turns out to be empty. “We should be lookin’ at 80k! Minimum! No way this is empty without strings being pulled. And the only person we know with juice like that is the fuckin’ queen.” Everybody seems to be trying to double-cross everybody else. Nobody can work out who can be trusted and who can’t, and there are lots of violent deaths perpetrated by unknown killers for unknown reasons. There’s also a team of cops, always lagging behind the action, whose only function in terms of the plot seems to be to gaze at corpses and wonder what the heck is going on. But this is Volume 1 of The Hive, presumably the first volume of several, so doubtless the cops will have a bigger part to play in later instalments.
The problem with stories like this is that because they focus on a handful of individuals with super-powers, anyone who is merely “ordinary” is relegated to the status of disposable cannon-fodder. They get rubbed out in droves, and nobody gives a damn. But don’t take it too seriously. It’s knockabout fun, thrill-a-minute stuff, packed with excitement and titillation and gore and big explosions. Just enjoy the ride.
A.J. Lieberman (W), Mike Henderson (A), Inaki Azpiazu (C/L) • Image Comics, $15.99
Review by Edward Picot
