Ah, nothing like being told that if a project works, everything you’ve been won’t exist.
Creative Staff:
Writer/Artist: John Byrne
What They Say:
Bethany isn’t the only one who has reached the 24th Century, but Gillian did it the ‘easy’ way. Her story is told at last, and many lives it takes to tell it!
The Review:
With the revelation in the previous issue that Gil is actually Gillian and is also one of the Next Men from the Greenery, this issue spends the bulk of its time with her history. Or at least a big chunk of it as we don’t see how she got from the Greenery to the real world, where we see her in the late 1900’s in the body of a young woman named Chrissy whose life she makes hell by being there. Gillian’s ability and presence as a disembodied mind that moves from body to body as a second personality is an interesting one, one that lets her move across the years in a really intriguing way. For the early part of it, we see her in positions where little really happens, such as Chrissy where she’s just killing time and doing nothing of importance. But when she shifts out later on and ends up in an experimental doctor’s mind, it lets them work out a lot of stuff for decades to come about the science of the mind and what can be accomplished with it, though we don’t see the results directly.
What we do see over the course of a couple hundred years (where’s my timeline when I need one!) is Gillian switching down the line to various people and encountering numerous situations. One has him in a lesbian relationship for a few years before ending up in the body of a university professor where she spends her time shaping other minds. That in turn has her meeting a young man that ends up going to war. The shift to different bodies brings so many changes, and so many opportunities, that it’s intriguing to watch as Gillian bonds with each of them and becomes a key part of their lives as they move on. They don’t all have big, grand plans or lives, but they’re instrumental in moving things forward at times or getting Gillian to where she needs to be. There’s a good deal of space material as well which is really fun since we see how Gillian really got around and had so many experiences.
But as things moved further and further forward, and the science became so much more, we see how she ended up working with those that could clone bodies and that is how Gillian arrived in the Gil that we know now, as he’s cloned them going forward and shifted when necessary. That period of time, and the honesty about what she is, lead to the creation of the team that wanted to send Kirkland back to stop Hilltop but ended up causing the next stage in Sathanas’ evolution. There isn’t enough time spent on that part in my opinion, but it showcases just how involved this part of the story is with that older segment. It gets convoluted in trying to follow how the time line flows in the series but it’s effective in making you really think about it. And now having Gil come up with the idea of sending the Next Men back to correct things further, having seen how Toni’s efforts have gone, it has the potential to change everything again in an even more significant way.
Release Notes:
This comiXology edition of Next Men comes with the main cover as released with the print edition and no other extras.
In Summary:
I love time travel and all the complications that comes with it, and that’s definitely an element to the series at this stage with what Gil wants to do. Gil’s story is endlessly fascinating and it’s something that you’d like to see expanded in a lot of ways with its own book or couple of thick books to really show what it’s like to live that way for all those years. Next Men is just short of ending this particular run and while it does have a bit of a rushed feeling to it, I loved that Byrne took a whole issue to focus on Gillian and her slow but steady travel through time to where she is now and how she intends to right things that have gone on. This issue took a couple of pages before things really came together, but it’s the kind that has a lot of re-reading value, much like the whole series does.
Grade: B+
Readers Rating: [ratings]
