John Byrne's Next Men (also known as Next Men or JBNM) is a comic book series written and drawn by John Byrne. It ran 31 issues plus a standalone prequel 2112. The series was published between 1991 and 1995 by Dark Horse Comics.
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.
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:
- Bethany (A.K.A. Hardbody), who is invulnerable to harm, but who loses physical sensation and whose skin bleaches white.
- Danny (A.K.A Sprint), who can run at superhuman speeds.
- Jack (A.K.A. Brawn), who is super-strong but cannot control his strength.
- Jasmine (A.K.A. Bouncer), a young super-acrobat.
- Nathan (A.K.A. Scanner), whose mutated eyes are large and black and allow him to see a wide spectrum of light.
The original run of 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 at the time, and he returned to working for hire at DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He eventually restarted the series at IDW Publishing, leading to a more satisfying (if not absolutely final) conclusion.
The original series contains examples of:
- Actually, I Am Him: Sathanas is Aldus Hilltop's future self, acting to maintain the Stable Time Loop that causes Hilltop to be "triggered" as a superhuman and become Sathanas.
- Big Bad: Aldus Hiltop appears to be this, but the true Big Bad is Sathanas; then again, Sathanas is a future incarnation of Hilltop.
- Body Surf: Somehow, this is Gillian's, Danny's twin sister, ability.
- Crossover: One of the earliest appearances of Hellboy was in this series. Also featured in the series are guest appearances by Concrete, Monkeyman and O'Brien, and characters from ElfQuest.
- Deus Sex Machina: When the Next Men have sex outside of their team, it becomes a catalyst which bestows super-power mutations on normal humans, leading to the world seen in 2112.
- Does Not Know His Own Strength: Jack cannot control his super-strength and has to be guided places so he does not break objects by accidentally brushing up against them.
- Feel No Pain: Bethany is Nigh-Invulnerable but the side-effect of this is that she can't feel any physical sensation, including pain.
- The First Superheroes: As part of a decades-long secret eugenics project, babies were taken from their mothers and placed in a virtual reality simulation named "The Greenery", where they were to develop their powers in a controlled environment. One day, five of them escape from confinement and, due to being naïve in the ways of the real world, begin to wreak havoc in a small town, until they are officially introduced to the public eye through a comic book company.
- Foreshadowing: In what might be a case of subtle foreshadowing, in issue #23, time-traveller Kirkland narrates that Hilltop's presidency ushers in a golden age for America, and the artwork depicts a glasses-wearing woman that looks suspiciously like Hilltop's former secretary and mistress.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: About halfway through the original series, the plots began to take on this format.
- Heroic Build: For Jack and Danny. Jack is the typical "exaggerated bodybuilder physique," though in a Muscles Are Meaningful case, as he's just as strong as he looks. In Danny's case, his leg muscles are extremely developed and disproportional for his age and size, to support his Super-Speed.
- Left Hanging: The end of the original series had Gillian (Danny's twin) sharing a body with her elder half-sister Chrissie and escaping from juvie; Danny, Bethany, Jasmine, Nathan and agent Antonia dragged by an armored figure through a portal; the White House exploding and severely injuring President Hilltop - closing the circle of him becoming Sathanas -, and Cornelius Van Damme posing as Hilltop as if he had survived the explosion - all the while helped by Hilltop's former secretary. Jack's fate is left unaccounted for.
- Mating Dance: The Next Men call sex "dancing" this leads to some interesting conversations and misunderstandings when they escape into the real world.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: Bethany is the Made of Diamond type.
- Razor Floss: Bethany's hair (being as indestructible as the rest of her) worked like this. She could use a single strand of her hair to saw through an iron bar (and if you tried to grab her hair, you'd lose your fingers).
- Secret Project Refugee Family
- Sense Loss Sadness: Bethany gradually becomes more withdrawn from the team, and from humanity as a whole as she loses the ability to feel physical sensation.
- Sex Equals Love: After his one-night stand with Sandy, Danny, possibly due to his naïveté, begins to think he is in love with her.
- Stable Time Loop: Sathanas and Thomas Kirkland are both traveling to the past, though Sathanas is attempting to make sure history happens as he remembers it, while Kirkland has been taught that history is immutable, he still attempts to alter history.
- Token Minority: Intentionally averted. The Next Men were the result of a white supremacist project, so they're all Caucasian. One of the reasons Byrne did this,
he admits, was to avoid dealing with various controversial race issues that might have interfered with the story. - True Companions: The Next Men start off like this, but then the two couples that make up four fifths of the group grow further apart once they are in the real world, and the group begins to operate less like a family and more like a unit of soldiers.
- We Can Rule Together: In the last issue of the original series, President Hilltop realizes he is Sathanas from the future where he rules the mutates and makes a proposition to the Next Men: they can be his vanguard, the first of their army of mutates.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: With so many plots being juggled near the end of the original series, it's unclear what will be picked up in the new series and what will become a case of this.
- Writing Around Trademarks: Byrne intended to have a character named Dreadface appear in the Next Men as an exaggeration of the type of name Marvel Comics gave characters. A few months before the character was due to make his first appearance, an issue of Fantastic Four came out featuring a character called Dreadface. The Next Men character was hurriedly renamed, becoming Lord Trogg.
The sequel series provides examples of:
- A Day in the Limelight: Issue #[3]8 focuses on Gillian's story, jumping from body to body until the future depicted in this volume.
- All Just a Dream: Issue #[3]1 begins with Jasmine waking up alongside her friends and senator Hilltop, who all try to convince her the events of Vol. 1 were all figments of her imagination. Of course, this is also a dream - more like a nightmare, really -, from which she wakes up still trapped in the Prehistoric Age with Nathan.
- An Arm and a Leg: While trapped in the 1860s American South, agent Tony Murcheson suffers a left foot amputation by her slave master.
- Body Surf: One of the Next Men's helpers in the future is a person named Gil, who is atually the mind of Gillian, Danny's twin sister, inhabiting a male body.
- Demoted to Extra: Sathanas, the Big Bad of Vol. 1, barely appears on panel save for a flashback, and is unceremoniously killed off-panel with a bomb on the same place he arrived in the present in Vol. 1. Fake/Impostor President Hilltop also appears for a brief sequence where agent Tony Murcheson implies she knows about his ruse.
- Eye Scream: While stranded in a concentration camp during World War II, Nathan has his eyes surgically removed by Fleming Jorgenson, who, at this time, was operating under the Nazi command.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- Agent Tony Murcheson is stranded in the United States during the final moments of the American Civil War, and gets captured as a slave by a local Southerner slave owner. She escapes and goes to Washington just in time to stop Abraham Lincoln's assassination. This leads her to be Lincoln's confidant, a fierce campaigner for human rights and to be revered as a saint.
- In issue #[3]9, Tony tries to talk Jasmine into going through with the plan to stop Sathanas's rise and the beginning of the Next Men project, and, after reading "Antonia Murcheson"'s bibliography, decides to go back to 1865 and live out her days as "Antonia Murcheson", Civil War hero.
- Shakespeare in Fiction: After being trapped in the Prehistoric Age, Jasmine somehow is plunged forward in time to Elizabethan London, where she is taken in by Lord Edward De Vere and becomes one of his maidservants. Three months into her new life, she reads De Vere's poetry and recognizes it as Shakespeare's future work.
- Turn to Religion: This is Jack's decision in Vol. 2: he becomes a chaplain, later a priest, after being given a Bible by a blind priest in Vol. 1.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- Danny's fate is left ambiguous in the series, but it is implied he was devoured by a dinosaur in the Prehistoric Age.
- Jack's fate after Vol. 1 is shown: he is arrested, but becomes the penitentiary chaplain under the alias of John Kavanagh.
- What's Up, King Dude?: After Murcheson is thrown through time and ends up in the American Civil War, she is startled to learn how easy it is for her to walk into the White House and meet with Abraham Lincoln.
Next Men: Aftermath shows examples of:
- Big Damn Heroes: Vanguard appears in the nick of time to save alternate Bethany from her would-be rapists.
- The Bus Came Back: The main reason for the events of the "Time Crash" plot? Actually a hodge-podge of memories and the wild imagination of Sandy Tolliver, who supposedly died at the end of the Power arc of the first series.
- Captain Ersatz: According to Sandy Tolliver, one of her boss's first comic books was a rip-off of DC Comics's Kamandi named Kay-Mandy, The Last Girl in the World.
- Cryptic Background Reference: The 1975 plot focuses mostly on the two agents Gower and Blaine, with Nathan and Bethany tagging along and making vague references to their shared past, e.g., their future/former teammate Jasmine and Senator Hilltop.
- Foreshadowing: In the first issue, a younger Jasmine is told by a fellow survivor that the sky looks unnatural, since it is daylight at all times (despite the lack of a Sun) and with lighting that looks more like a comic book.
- Gender Bender: Hero Vanguard are actually a pair of African-American twins that become Vanguard by using two magical bracelets. When they turn into Vanguard again, a female version appears.
- Happy Place / Lotus-Eater Machine: Zig-zagged. At the very end of the series, an older Jasmine asks Sandy Tolliver, who still has her reality-manipulating powers, to make "The Greenery" real for her. Her mind goes back to her paradise, idyllic existence with her friends, while her body is kept in a coma in a room.
- Out of Focus / Put on a Bus: Like in Vol. 2, Danny and Jack are left out for the remainder of the series, which instead focuses on Jasmine, Nathan and Bethany.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Sandy Tolliver survived her suicide attempt and was nursed back to health, and later moved in with her grandparents. One day she watches a documentary on Abraham Lincoln, and how he survived his assassination attempt. Thing is, Sandy still remembers he was assassinated, just not in this new timeline.
- Time Crash: The Next Men appears to be caught in one, since dinosaurs coexist along with prehistoric men, Roman legionnaires, and a Civil War regiment. But this is not really the case.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: The main focus of the book are two plots: in 1975, a pair of agents of a secretive government agency sent by an older Bethany and Nathan to find a person of interest (Jasmine's mother); and the time crash, where the characters left off from the previous series.
