Hickman's heroes?

After enjoying Jonathan Hickman’s Marvels about the Fantastic 4 as a family tragedy blending into tales of cosmic wonder in Future Foundation, and chilling sci-fi horror building dreadful utopia in a Darwinian bubble with a core of Aldous Huxley riffs for an apocalyptic Avengers saga of moral panic, I bought Hickman’s early works, to see whether certain critics were right about him being as radical as a ‘new Warren Ellis’, for creating a strong brand with multi-verse comics. 

The author’s first solo outings, a political-conspiracy and murder-mystery in The Nightly News (2007), and the global alternate-history steered by Lefty time-travellers in Pax Romana (2009), are wholly different absurdist narratives. Yet both of them are live-wire testers, with minimalist graphic-design elements, wrapped around starkly illustrated fictions, emerging from post-millennial avant-garde formats, most notable in particular for using rather drab colours (many characters appear only as silhouettes), perhaps in order to emphasise this breakaway impressionistic styling from storytelling convention of typical comics - but especially those about costumed superheroes. 

Documentary styled book TransHuman (2009), has Hickman’s ideas for entertaining genre comedy illustrated by J.M. Ringuet, while it’s about rivalries between cyber and genetics in corporate-science for planning socio-political (re-)evolution. Unleashing a freaky parody of Marvel’s X-Men and Inhumans with wannabe heroes crashing various moral and ethical boundaries to compare with 'New Wave' SF taking inspiration from Aldiss’ themes of ‘hubris clobbered by nemesis’, where the super-villains are Big Money, and (of course) Human Nature, now following a downward spiral that, only retrospectively but also winningly, parodies Hickman’s later ‘Children of Tomorrow’ gig-writing for Avengers books.  

Hickman is teamed with artist Ryan Bodenheim for epic Red Mass For MARS (2010), a millennia-spanning sci-fi polemic about superheroic defence of Earth from invasion by alien hive-mind, while narration considers humanity’s journey in phases to utopia, or something quite like it. There’s no equality in eternity, but ultimate star-man Mars fights unstoppable fate to accomplish his destiny, so planetary civilisation can emerge after genuine freedom from religion is achieved. 

Throwaway futurism in The Red Wing (2011), with art by Nick Pitarra, forms a stylish backdrop for this bold time-travel mystery, of legacy in warfare where a century’s lost to enemy forces instead of territory. Dizzy narrative is punctuated by many surprising revelations and eight pages of blackout featuring one tiny image to symbolise a pilot’s risky encounter with oblivion. Hickman’s range of themes expands even when a focus upon novella-sized SF is offered. The potent design of sudden death-scenes is visually compelling and emotionally devastating.   

I haven’t read Hickman’s more recent East Of West saga but The Manhattan Projects (six volumes, 2012-6, again with Pitarra) seems like his very best weird genre work. A blistering array of ghastly nightmares by mad-science anti-heroes (bizarro versions of Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman, Fermi, and von Braun, dominate crazy plots), are perpetrated with transformative glee, while the nuclear messiah Daghlian was clearly influenced by Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan, and first spaceman Yuri Gagarin becomes a freshly iconic Flash Gordon/ Buck Rogers explorer with talking super-dog Laika. If nothing else, this chaotic story develops into arguably the greatest, most hilarious, SF satire - with Hickman’s brutally unrelenting consistency of purpose faultlessly etched by sublime caricatures, since Kubrick’s nuclear black-comedy classic Dr Strangelove.

Co-created with Mike Costa, Hickman’s God Is Dead (2013) is every meta-theological apocalypse gouged into a crumbling world-scape, where Greek, Egyptian, Indian, and Mexican deities face mythical competition from Norse and scientific gods for prayers. It’s a fatal saga of beliefs where atheists are sacrificed first. Who wins the grisly fights between Anubis and Quetzalcoatl, or Zeus and Thor? What happens after the failures, by desperate secular genius, to salvage the planet by spawning a Mammon incarnate? Is there any chance of salvation for humanity? In retrospect, Hickman’s final answers are obvious, but his rather whimsical approach supports plenty of blood and thunder.

In contrast to derivative TV show American Gods (2017) adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novel, this is a briskly forthright horror epic, that strives to avoid metaphors and euphemisms, with gleeful confrontations between savage forces of darkness and the human misery of giving up on ghosts. It never pretends we might have another Enlightenment in the future. There’s only the grim realisation that Holocaust never ended in WW2. In this, it’s a reminder that Ellis’ astonishing Supergod (2011) was the perfection of subgenre in comics. 

Hickman’s comics boast more than enough big SF ideas with grandly composed genre plots to match the best of his rivals, but Ellis demonstrates far greater skill at forming bold groups of well-rounded and sympathetic (if not always likeable) characters while Hickman usually makes do with (sometimes appealing) versions of heroic archetypes. It seems that Ellis positions his people to drive story-telling vehicles, while Hickman’s briskly sketched heroes merely populate his agenda-wise scenarios.