Finally for this week, The Un-Men return in a rather unlikely ongoing series from Vertigo.

The Un-Men are old Swamp Thing villains from years ago, but you really don't need to know that.  For present purposes, it's good enough to know that they're all freaks - a guy with two upper bodies, a head attached directly to a hand, things like that.

The high concept here is that the Un-Men have somehow inveigled their way into running the town of Aberrance, a reservation for freaks and the deformed.  Under their rule, Aberrance has ended up as an enormously successful freakshow theme park, and it's on the verge of getting its very own reality TV show, American Freak.  The Un-Men are even making extra freaks to keep up with the demand, by experimenting on what seems to be a constant stream of enthusiastic exhibitionists.  But the more trivially deformed inhabitants of Aberrance aren't doing so well under the new regime, and they're getting restless.

When an opposition leader is murdered, government agent Kilcrop is sent to investigate.  Thanks to his department's dodgy sense of irony, they've selected him as an African-American albino, even though he has no interest in being a freak.

There's a distant similarity here to Vertigo's other reservation crime series, Scalped.  But the main concern of this book seems to be to take the concept of sideshow freaks and bring it up to date by tying it in with modern forms of exploitation.  Then there's the question of just how far you want to stand out from the crowd.  The Un-Men and some of their transformees are enthusiastic about being different; Kilcrop just wants his condition to be irrelevant.

This is a fine start.  The mystery is serviceable enough - given that it's a villain book, it's not much of a mystery.  But it serves its purpose as a device to get Kilcrop to the Un-Men's bizarre town, and the series does have some interesting ideas to explore.  The idea of a sideshow freak reality TV show hovers on the edge of being disconcertingly plausible.

Mike Hawthorne's art underplays the freakiness, which is probably for the best.  It helps the story to retain some level of grounding in reality.  When the concept is as far over the top as this, and you want people to take it seriously, then it helps to play it straight.  Hawthorne makes sure to hold back so that when he really needs to sell something as grotesque, he has somewhere to go.

I'm not quite sure where you go with this as a long-term ongoing series, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  A good first issue with plenty of potential.

Rating: A-

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