Review of "Next Men #0," by John Byrne

 Review of

Next Men #0, by John Byrne

Four out of five stars

Routine premise, solid context establishment

 While the producers of this first installment of a comic adventure series do a good job in setting the basic context for the characters and end with a solid cliffhanger, the premise is well worn. A group of five people are in some form of stasis tanks as a part of a decades long super-secret government project to create beings with superpowers. They are the remaining subjects of the experimentation, while not explicitly stated, it appears that many other failures have preceded them.

 The project is run by an unscrupulous, ruthless Senator and the people running the project are trying to shut it down quickly as a government inspector is due to arrive soon. However, the action of shutting it down causes the people to emerge from their stasis and try to determine what their situation really is. The government inspector arrives a few days early and there is some hostility to the point of a gunfight. When the inspector defends the five with powers, she is shot and seriously wounded, leading to an unorthodox team-up.

 The secret government project run by ruthless government agents that is designed to create superpowered beings has been used so often in so many forms that it is growing stale. The creators manage to rise a bit above that and create an interesting comic, even with those limitations.