20th Century Men // Review
The contemporary superhero genre was born in WWII. It grew up during the Cold War. The implications of this have been explored in a variety of different dreams and nightmares that have migrated to page and panel over the course of the past half-century or so. The latest look at the superhero and world history comes courtesy of writer Deniz Camp as his new series 20th Century Men enters its debut issue. Gentle complexities play out in an alternate timeline U.S. that is thoughtfully constructed on the page by artist S. Morian.
The Soviet super-soldier is a giant, clanking cyborg who has had his heart replaced by something of his own design. It’s 1987, and he’s risen to a very high rank. He’s serving in Afghanistan in a world where the USSR just might be able to completely dominate the region. This is of great concern to the U.S. President...a guy named Thomas who had been the U.S. super soldier in another life. Now he’s looking to Afghanistan. There’s more than a mere clash between superpowers at stake as an Afghan woman looks to assert herself amidst the chaos of an impending global war.
Camp lays down a world of bewildering complexity on the page in long blocks of text. It’s a world that is almost identical to our own. There happen to be a few people with a few powers who have come to define things differently. A Soviet superman has tremendous strength and ingenuity that may pull the world in the direction of the USSR. Meanwhile in the U.S., a super-powered war hero has just been elected president. (The guy’s charismatic enough to have beaten Reagan in a landslide.) The heat-up of the Cold War feels particularly stylish in the hands of an author looking to bring political intrigue to the page as well as a dark superhero-style action.
Morian makes the U.S. President look like classic depictions of Uncle Sam without making it totally obvious. It’s really obvious, and yet...it’s not. The superheroic analysis of the Cold War has been done a million times, but Morian has found a design for the world of 20th Century Man that grounds the fantasy in a very believable world of the late 1980s. While it’s true that the big Soviet exoskeleton/cyborg thing looks like something out of a drawing board at Games Workshop in 1987, it looks bulky and brutal enough to have been very real back then...as does much of the rest of a very compellingly-rendered world of emotional drama that feels real enough in places to be posing for a photographer from Time magazine.
Though there ARE some really interesting ideas crawling up out of the intricate history that Camp is working with, the story has a long way to go before it can really define itself as being a truly novel look at the 20th century as seen through the lens of superhero myth. The three heroes of opposing nations prepare for a serious clash in a very sophisticated political world. It will be interesting to see where Camp and Morian point the upcoming pages. Camp’s initial glance at the Cold War is compelling enough to warrant serious consideration of the second issue. It will remain to be seen where the series goes from there.
