Jonathan Hickman is the creator of Nightly News and Pax Romana, two comics notable for their extremely design-conscious artwork.  Sometimes, his pages resemble diagrams more than conventional stories.

Transhuman is something a little different.  Hickman is only writing it, with art from the relatively conventional JM Ringuet.  However, it's still an unusual comic, as Hickman appears to have set out to make a mockumentary in comic form.

The story appears to be a comic-book rendering of a near-future documentary about the history of the "transhumanist" movement - the improvement of the human body through a mixture of genetics and technology.  It's the sort of thing Warren Ellis likes to bang on about, but this strips away the usual alt-culture trappings and presents the movement as a story of scientists and businessmen competing to bring their products to market.  It's the sort of comic in which the phrase "restrictive covenant" appears.

It's a fairly interesting story, which establishes its main characters quite well through interview segments, and which lightens up the proceedings with some black comedy.  However, as a formal experiment, I'm not altogether sure it works.

The mockumentary sub-genre works by presenting itself as a real documentary, and appropriating the trappings of non-fiction film-making.  But non-fiction comics are extremely rare.  They tend to come in two types: visual essays, and autobiography.  Crucially, there's no such thing as a comic book documentary, because a comic doesn't have a camera, and can't document anything in that sense. 

So, comics don't have an established non-fiction form to ape, and if they did, it wouldn't be the documentary.  That makes the idea of a comic book mockumentary a little questionable, to my mind.  What you end up with is something that looks like it wants to be a film, and which can't really take advantage of the storytelling devices of comics.  And when the art does cut loose and fill the page with diagrams, it doesn't really fit the mockumentary conceit.

On some levels, this is quite interesting.  But it really does feel like something that wants to be in a different medium entirely.  In fairness, that's because it's trying something very difficult - mock non-fiction in a medium where the trappings of non-fiction have yet to be consistently defined.  I can't see how we can skip straight to the stage of subverting conventions that don't yet exist.  Still, I admire the effort.

Rating: B

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