Trade Review: The Manhattan Projects Vol. 1

I read a lot of comic books week to week, so I figured, why not write about it?

This week I finished, The Manhattan Projects Vol. 1:  Science.  Bad. Published by Image Comics, written by Jonathan Hickman, and art by Nick Pitarra.

This book is a really interesting take on science in the 40's.  It opens up with Oppenheimer being hired by the US government to assist them with the atomic bomb, being given a tour of the super secret Base Zero, and showing us the team of great minds they've retained.  During the tour, the book dives right into a Japanese assault on their secret base, with a Red Torii being dropped onto the base, which turns out to be a portal powered by Zen, channeled through "Death Buddhists."  The portal opens and Japanese automatons come pouring out, seeking to kill all of the scientists in the base.  Reality has been thrown out the window.

This might as well be a picture out of a US history book.

General Groves and President Roosevelt have put together this crack team of scientists, each with their own unique skills, to work on next level scientific projects and research.  

As you might have gathered, things are slightly different in this book than actual reality.  That is because this is a fictional telling of the World War II era, and what the Manhattan Project actually represented.  Every person in this initial cast was involved in some way with the actual Manhattan Project, except Werner Von Braun, a Nazi scientist involved in rocket science who defected to the US in 1945, after surrendering to American soldiers.  It's like US history meets X-Men.  How can you not be into this?

Hickman does a great job of putting this world together, with each issue giving us a little insight into our intellectual heroes pasts.  The back stories are illustrated only in reds and blues, with the red parts usually representing some change for the character, usually a "bad" element.  A bad brother, an invention gone wrong, or just an important childhood memory.

For me, these are my favorite types of books.  I have a long history of loving comics based in older source material.  Fables, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Agents of Atlas, these are all stories where writers take characters from another era, and then make those characters their own unique vision.  The balls it must take to completely alter the known history of established stories.  This isn't like a writer who is taking over Batman, changing the relationship he has with Robin.  This is saying that Einstein was being held captive in an underground facility, and being forced to work for the government.  Yes, even though the characters in The Manhattan Projects were real people, I still think of it as the same premise.

I just love the ideas of an "alternate history," with aliens and parallel universes out to destroy life as we know it.  I picked this book up on a whim, and I am glad that I did.  Hickman has kind of hit or miss for me lately, but The Manhattan Projects is a big hit.