Rumble in the Concrete Jungle

Review of Elephantmen Volume 1, Wounded Animals. Written by Richard Starkings, with art by Moritrat and additional contributing artists.
Review by Kerey McKenna

Imagine your “standard” cyberpunk cityscape: The sprawling metropolises of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. Futurist elements whiz by, a flying car here, a holographic display there, yet there is a 20th century familiarity. Some of those flying cars are yellow with a black checkerboard pattern, or blue and white with emergency lighting, instantly recognizable as taxi cabs and police cruisers respectively. The people that walk the busy streets, aside from the occasional outlandish “future fashion,” don a mish mash of styles for the 20th century: a bit of urban hip from the 1980’s, some 90's casual, and a dash of 1940’s trench coats and fedoras to give that pulp/noir undertone cyberpunk is so fond of invoking. And like the noirs and pulps there are many beautiful woman: femmes fatales, girls Friday, and mob wives, all with legs that take the scenic route up.

Now to this sprawling burg of 200 years from next Sunday, add something truly odd: eight foot tall behemoths with the heads of African animals—hippos, crocodiles, rhinos, camels, and of course elephants. These human/animal hybrids known collectively as “elephantmen” (despite there being many kinds) are veterans from the last world war. Created by the insidious MAPPO Corporation, these creatures were bred, trained and medicated to serve as the new infantry of the 23rd century. After the war, freed of their murderous programming (but still in possession of inhuman strength and animal instincts held in check by human souls), they try to make their way in the world. Many have fallen to the bottom of society doing menial labor. A few have climbed tooth and nail to the top to become celebrities, captains of industry, and “legitimate businessmen” with no ties whatsoever to organized crime <wink, wink>. And patrolling the streets, keeping the uneasy peace between the human and transgenic citizens, are two federal agents, Hieronymus “Hip” Flask (hippopotamus hybrid) and Ebenezer “Ebony” Hide (elephant hybrid).

Elephantmen is more about the journey and the atmosphere than the destination. For a series that takes so many visual cues from film noir and pulp detective stories (for example our heroic animal men have elephantine size trench coats and, save for the flying cars, the city they inhabit feels very much like the early 20th century), the first volume of Elephantmen doesn’t concern itself with being a police procedural or setting up “who-done-its” for the clever detectives to solve. Each chapter is headed by a different art team and has a different narrative feel. In the first episode a little girl’s naive inquiries of an elephantman stir the traumatic memories within him. In another episode a brutal beat down between a hippo-man and a crocodile-man has as its only narration excerpts from the Book of Job that cast one combatant as the Behemoth and the other as the Leviathan. It's followed by a quiet interlude showing a Good Samaritan stopping to help a bloodied and wounded combatant from the previous episode. Elephantmen: Wounded Animals is concerned with how its characters were shaped by war. Were they victims, war criminals, or both? How do the humans and animal men that participated in the war fit into a peacetime world? Can they survive as everyday citizens or must they embrace the savage survival skills that got them through the war?

As I said, Elephantmen doesn’t concern itself with racing to resolutions to these questions. With art this rich, I can’t blame it. Many of the plot seeds and McGuffins introduced in the premiere won’t have payoffs for several more volumes. But given the lush artwork and contemplations on such topics as bioethics, veterans’ issues, race relations, and the thin line between fascination with and alienation from “the other,” this series has a lot more to offer than the surface premise—a hippo and an elephant fight crime in THE FUTURE—suggests.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 7, 2016. Learn more at www.watchcityfestival.com.