Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
"descision" on p98 should be "decision"
Boy-1 has a lot in common with the rebooted planet of the apes - genetic manipulation. They have super-intelligent chimpanzees, but the real focus, for reasons unexplained, is on producing genetically superior humans. Their DNA donor is code-named Clark Kent, for example. Jadas Riezner is a pill-popping young man with predictable issues, who is inexplicably in charge of the lab where the genetic manipulation is going on. He has, of course, the requisite "hot" girlfriend, who is evidently both very willing and long-suffering, and he has a 'Jarvis' in the form of a pale blue holographic face which somehow is supposed to help him with the experiments, and which magically hovers in the air in his lab. Jarvis here is named Victor, and "he" speaks in matching pale blue text which was actually hard to read.
Victor tells us he has already started on the experiment by tweaking chromosomes for disease resistance, and for "prolonged lung capacity". I have no idea what that is. We all have prolonged lung capacity - some people can reach a century or more on one pair of lungs. How much more prolonged do you need? I suspect what was meant here was increased lung capacity, but that would do no good without corresponding changes to the rest of the respiratory system, so the science here is a bit shaky, but not abysmally bad.
There was an unfortunate amount of active genderism and passive racism in this, which in some ways isn't surprising - it's a comic book and those features seem to go hand-in-glove. In any rational way it's disturbing that the girlfriend - and very nearly all other females featured here - are included purely as sex objects (with the naughty bits excluded, of course!). All the lab people are white males. Even Victor is really a white male notwithstanding his blue tinge. Victor utters genderist pronouncements like "...man discovered genetic superiority 700 years ago...." I suspect it was a lot earlier that that, and whoever was the first to have these ideas, who is to say it was not a woman? It would not have hurt to have phrased that as "...humans discovered genetic superiority many years ago...."
Jadas's issue is his dad, who evidently has disappeared and of course, Jadas knows squat about him. His dad was a scientist, so you know there's something going on with Jadas. The latter asks Victor, an AI which has been around in one form or another for a long time, for his help, but Victor can't remember! Jadas magically ditches his prescription pill addiction and starts investigating. Down in the computer area, the IT guy evidently knows squat. He opens a drive door and the drive slides out like it's a CD. No. These drives are sealed to keep out air and dust (and yes, this applied even in the nineties). You can't slide one open like that. Worse, the IT guy says he "wiped the drive to see what's left" I dunno. Maybe he means he wiped it with an oily rag, because if you actually wipe a drive then there's nothing left because it means you erased it all! LOL! It's highly unlikely that old data from the nineties would be on drives. It'd be more likely on digital back-up tapes stored off-site.
I would have been happy with the story as it was at this point, but there was a rather predictable back-story to it. There's a secret about Jadas. It's not just that he can ride the subway without having a penny on him! Nor is it that he's questioned by someone who thinks her name (rather than her title and name) is Dr Martinez! She was one of the few women in this story who was not a prostitute, a bad guy, or a submissive mating partner. So she was in it for only a few panels, of course. But there's a disease spreading out of Nigeria, and apparently Jadas's history and this disease are connected. Suddenly Jadas is on the run, and everyone wants to find him.
Like I said, I had some issues with the science, and with the author's idea of how evolution works. You can't create a 'superman' by genetic manipulation, because genes mutate, not only in your super-race, but also in diseases. This is how evolution works. Even if you created someone with powerful genetic resistance to disease, disease would evolve to combat your improvements and over time, down the generations, humans would succumb again, even had they been bred from 'super parents'. The fact is though, that we already are super people in a sense. We're the ones endowed with genes which have survived endless onslaught from disease and parasites. Our genes are super genes, having proven themselves for literally thousands of years, but as you can see from disease outbreaks all over the world, they will never be super enough to do what this story argues has been done.
If you're willing to overlook that, then this graphic novel may well do the trick for you, and be a worthy read. For me, the story wasn't that compelling, and it was far too white and genderist for my taste. For all the talk about global communities, almost the entire 'cast' of this novel was white. Even the Chinese people looked Caucasian. The two black guys featured were both shown in subservient roles. The fact is that although humans, having been through a bottleneck, are genetically homogenous, the greatest genetic diversity is found in Africans. I would have made more sense if Jadas had been a black child, and even more sense if he had been a she, since female infants tend to be much more hardy than males.
It's for these reasons that I'm not willing to rate this as a worthy read. Comic books are never going to shed their juvenile baggage if they continue to approach stories from an immature perspective.
