The idea of a mockumentary on the transhumanist movement is an interesting one.  Certainly there’s something ludicrous about some of the proponents of immortality, downloading your consciousness into digital form, nanotechnology, and so on.  But it’s the kind of ludicrous that could have something in it, especially in a world where America’s black president is pushing billions into alternative energy research, tabloids can’t get enough of the final days of a reality tv star, and New Scientist runs a cover story suggesting that the universe is a hologram.

Maybe the truly ludicrous aspect of Transhuman is that it appears in the form of a comic.  The four issue series is out in a newly collected edition, written by Jonathan Hickman, previously praised in these parts for his debut work, Nightly News.  This time round, he writes but doesn’t draw, and that makes for some interesting shifts of perception about his capabilities: Hickman’s radical page designs in Nightly News perhaps made it easy to camouflage weaknesses in its writing.  Here, with art by J.M. Ringuet, the appearance of the pages is more conventional: does the story suffer as a result?

It turns out that the answer is a qualified ‘no’.  There’s still some playing about with form and process, chunks of the story held together by the questions asked by a narrator, whose text reads white on black and is generally unseen.  That device works well, but I’m less convinced that the faux-reportage does.  It’s effective enough, but arguably serves to distance the reader from the story.  On the other hand, it serves a purpose, and allows Hickman to construct a reasonably fascinating tale about the future history of transhumanism through interviews with some of the key figures involved in turning the movement into something real.

The story relates the intrigues of a number of characters involved at the centre of the research and business growth of different strands of transhumanism.  One of Hickman’s successes is that he manages to turn an opening chapter on the science involved, and a subsequent one on venture capitalism, into credible and sometimes wittily depicted vignettes.  Sure, the tone varies in the process, as the tale goes from personal intrigue to twisted humour as experimental subjects are seen before and after they have treatments to make them into transhumans.  But overall the effect works well, and it’s good to see someone other than Warren Ellis tackle this kind of material with the intelligence it deserves.

Ringuet’s art is assured, if at times somewhat static: but maybe that’s a function of the fact that much of the tale needs little more than talking heads to be effective.  It more than does the job anyway.  Let’s hope that Hickman can maintain the quality of his writing while working with Marvel, which is where he now is.  And if that doesn’t work out in the long run, there’s a career for Hickman in producing twisted infographics for The Onion, where his satirical sensibility and design skills would fit more naturally than they do with the home of Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk.  Here’s to a future in which talents like Hickman can flourish without having to pimp themselves out to the publishers of trademarked superheroes.