Next Men

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John Byrne’s Next Men (also simply Next Men or JBNM) is a comic book series written and drawn by John Byrne. It ran 31 issues (#0–30) plus a standalone prequel (or, arguably, sequel), 2112. The series was published between 1991 and 1995 by Dark Horse Comics.

1 Synopsis
2 ‘M4’
3 Notes
4 Collections
5 External links

[edit] Synopsis

In 1955, an explosion in Antarctica draws the attention of a group of scientists. There they discover dozens of charred bodies—and one live one in a mechanical exoskeleton. The survivor, Sathanas, kills all but one scientist, whom he uses to meet Senator Aldus Hilltop. Together—with Sathanas’ existence kept secret—the three construct Project Next Men, which creates batches of superhumans who are raised in a virtual reality.

In what is implicitly the near future (relative to the comic’s publication in the early 1990s), five of these Next Men manage to escape from confinement, but once free they find that their powers are very different than they were in their virtual world. The Next Men are:

Nathan, whose mutated eyes are large and black and allow him to see a wide spectrum of light
Jasmine, a young super-acrobat
Jack, who is super-strong but cannot control his strength
Bethany, who is invulnerable to harm, but who loses physical sensation and whose skin bleaches white
Danny, who can run at superhuman speeds

The Next Men are eventually rescued by a man called Control and his secret government organization, even as Hilltop rises to the Vice Presidency and then the Presidency. The Next Men explore the ramifications of their existence even as they turn out to be cogs in Sathanas’ decades-long master plan, a story involving time travel, eugenics and doppelgängers.

[edit] ‘M4’

In issue #7, a backup series, M4 (Mark IV) started. It dealt with an android, Mark IV, or “Mark Ivey” as one character called him. Initially appearing as a separate storyline, eventually the series started to tie into the Next Men storyline, and finally merged with it in #23.

[edit] Notes

The Next Men made a prototypical appearance as “Freaks” in a lithography plate that was published within The Portfolio of the DC Universe in the 1980s. Byrne had originally pitched the series to DC, but the series for some reason never surfaced. With some changes, he evolved it to fit in with his 2112 work (which ironically was a non-sold and revised future Marvel story) to become the series John Byrne’s Next Men. Two characters from the “Freaks” artwork somewhat retained their physical looks and became the lead characters of the Next Men series: heroine Jasmine and villain Aldus Hilltop.

Along with its late-1980s/early-1990s contemporaries such as Watchmen, JBNM was a deconstruction of the superhero genre, positing a world with nascent superhumans and considering how they would impact the world in fairly realistic terms, for the genre.

The Next Men series featured the first color appearance of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (second appearance overall).^{[citation needed]}

The series ended with a cliffhanger in #30. Byrne had intended to conclude the story in a second series, but the collapse of the American comic book industry in the mid-1990s made it financially unfeasible for him to do so, and he returned to working for hire at DC Comics and Marvel Comics. As of 2007, it is not known whether the Next Men story will ever be concluded.

On 12 October 2007, Byrne announced on his website that comic publisher IDW will release black & white “phonebook”-sized reprints of the Next Men series sometime in 2008. John Byrne has stated: “All the Next Men stuff will be coming from IDW in big, honkin’ black and white ‘phonebooks’ in the New Year. Don’t have a more precise schedule than that, but when I know, you’ll know.”

In an interview with IDW appearing in that publisher's April 2008 books, when asked about the possibility of a new Next Men series, Byrne answered, “If it looks like Next Men can be done as something other than a vanity project, I will certainly do it. The series has a definite ending--I even know the last line!--and I would very much like to shake those 20 or so issues out of my head someday!”