YMMV / Elephantmen

• Complete Monster:
  • Dr. Kazushi Nikken is a MAPPO Corporation scientist responsible for creating the eponymous Elephantmen, as well as being responsible for the pessimistic, dreary state the world is currently in. Driven by his obsession, Dr. Nikken spent trillions of dollars attempting to make a new species in Africa. After numerous failures, he finally succeeded after kidnapping women and fertilizing their eggs with animal DNA. Longing to make more Elephantmen, Dr. Nikken had hundreds of thousands of women around the area kidnapped and subjected to the painful procedure; the men and children, however, were murdered. After each woman gave birth, they were immediately killed and their bodies were discarded. With hundreds of thousands of Elephantmen at his disposal, Dr. Nikken had the creatures tortured and brainwashed throughout their lives, and raised them to become savage soldiers who were bred to kill. When United Nations discovered what MAPPO had been doing, the Elephantmen were deployed across Africa and Europe, resulting in a war that led to the deaths of millions. Even after Dr. Nikken is caught and arrested, he tries to excuse his actions by reminding the U.N. of all the good MAPPO has done, before immediately reverting back to his smug, god complex behavior.
  • Joshua Serengheti is a ruthless Black Market dealer and Sahara's Arch-Enemy. As a teenager, Serengheti discovered how to sell the drug known as "mirror" in order to make a profit, and soon came under the belief that anything anyone wanted could be sold for money. He soon began selling all forms of illegal items around the world, including humans, weapons, and drugs. After Serengheti's lover gave birth to Sahara, he sold her off to MAPPO, and forced his daughter to watch as everyone in the village was either kidnapped or murdered. For seven years, Serengheti tortured his daughter by having his men rape her and even had her circumcised while she was still a child. Several years after Sahara escapes and falls in love with Obadiah Horn, he sets out to destroy his daughter's reputation. Serengheti attempts to murder Horn while he's in the hospital—along with many medical workers—and later sends Tusk's severed head to them in a box as a warning. Upon finding out Sahara is pregnant and will soon marry Horn, he and his men roam around the city brutally interrogating anyone who has information on Sahara's whereabouts and murdering those who refuse to comply. Once he obtains enough information, Serengheti attacks Sahara and Horn at their wedding, mercilessly cutting down innocent civilians before he kills Panya, Sahara's close friend, and kidnaps Sahara's baby. Even in a society filled with literal "monsters", Serengheti stands out as a depraved man no different from the beasts he despises so much.
• Magnificent Bastard: Obadiah Horn is a prominent Elephantman in Los Angeles and the head of Horn Industries. Starting out as nothing but another MAPPO slave, Horn managed to use his resources, his connections to Sahara, and his brute strength to become one of the most powerful Elephantmen in the world. As leader of Horn Industries, Horn had his bodyguards eliminate anyone who opposed him outside the public's knowledge, all while he and Sahara continued to gain the media's support. After being put on house arrest due to murdering Gabbatha on his wedding day, Horn's benefactor, La Mantia, launches an invasion on Los Angeles and threatens Horn into joining Promethean. Horn rejects his proposal, kills La Mantia, and single-handedly stops the invasion. When Douglas Shore wins a mayoral election, Horn meets with Shore and informs him that he'll be running Shore's entire term in office behind closed doors, having already planted his own agents within Shore's staff just to ensure Horn still has full control over the city.
• Nightmare Fuel: Issue #17 shows exactly how the Elephantmen are created and the nightmarish hell the women (more than 300,000 of them) go through before giving birth (which in their case means getting ripped open and dying). The narrative constantly tells you not to look away and just accept that this is really what happened. Sleep tight.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The story is set in a Noir-esque Bio Punk future at its worst, and it really shows. All the villains are truly horrendous and consistently get away with horrific deeds, even the more likeable Elephantmen protagonists were inevitably born from systematic murder-rapes and killed many innocent people during the war, the setting is so grim and hopeless it seems impossible for any "good" to prevail (it's set after a multinational war that left hundreds of millions dead), and none of the Elephantmen can breed anyway so their entire existence will simply be an ugly pimple in the history books within fifty or sixty years. This can make it very difficult to care about the story and characters if nothing they do matters at all and will be forgotten within the setting anyway. The ending doesn't really resolve many of these conflicts, doesn't end on a positive note, and is instead open-ended, which doesn't exactly help these issues.

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