Peter Milligan has previously produced a miniseries and a graphic novel based on Len Wein and Carmine Infantino's Human Target, but now it's back as an ongoing series.

The basic premise of Human Target was straightforward: Christopher Chance is a master of disguise who offers up his services as a decoy.  Hence the name.  Played straight, this is a solid but not desperately interesting idea.  Milligan's approach has been to crank up Chance's mental health problems to the extent that the series becomes simultaneously a thriller and a bizarre discussion about the nature of identity.

Milligan's twist hinges on the idea that Chance achieves his uncannily accurate impersonations by self-delusion - a form of method acting so extreme that once Chance has got into character, he really believes that he actually is that person.  And it can be very, very difficult to get him out of it again.  If indeed you can even identify which character he is.

This means that Milligan gets to indulge in his favourite pasttime of screwing around with the rules of narrative and the audience's expectations.  Because of Chance's questionable state of mind, any male character at any time could conceivably be him.  Even first person narration doesn't answer the question because it could be Chance's own self-delusion.  He could quite easily be more than one character, without even realising it himself.  And if Chance has really subsumed his own identity to such a degree, what does it actually mean anyway?

I haven't read the graphic novel, largely because it was so ludicrously overpriced.  Yes, I know it eventually came out in trade paperback as well, but that's not the point.  There's a principle involved.  I'm not sure what the principle is, but I'm convinced that I'm upholding it.  Regardless, I understand that this opening issue plays heavily off the events of the graphic novel - understandably enough, since I infer that the novel ended with the ambiguous death of the lead character.  Reading the novel probably would assist, but there's enough material in here to make the general thrust of the story clear enough.  It's a single-issue story, incidentally, which seems to double as a deck-clearing exercise before launching into a new storyline next issue.

Javier Pulido's art, meanwhile, is ideal for this sort of book - simple yet distinct characters, where everyone looks different without getting you caught up in the practicalities of the impersonation.  Despite the roots of the series, this is a heavily character-driven story and Pulido's fabulous when it comes to that sort of material.

Now that the decks are cleared, the way should be clear for Milligan and Pulido to do something really interesting in the future.  In the meantime, this is more of a restatement of themes, but a welcome reintroduction to a great idea.

Rating: A-

back | continue