Rating: 2 stars
What if all the scientists working on the Manhattan project during the 1930s and 40s were actually super scientists, many of them with special abilities as well as their super genius? What if the Einstein of our world was actually replaced by a more sinister version from another dimension? What if Oppenheimer was actually so brilliant because he killed and ate people to acquire their knowledge and abilities, carrying with him their personalities, constantly warring within him?
This comic pre-supposes that the atomic bomb was only a tiny and fairly insignificant side project for these scientists, and that inter-dimensional portals, worm holes, space exploration, telepathy and the like were much more in their purview. Creating an artificial intelligence and using the body of the dead Franklin D. Roosevelt to channel it. That sort of thing.
This first volume of The Manhattan Projects was part of a haul to a local comics shop I visited while here in Chicago, wanting to find some new and interesting things to read this summer. While I'm sure this is selling well, it really wasn't my sort of thing. The art is interesting, and a bit more unusual than what I'm used to. The colour palette of red, white and blue is used a lot. While I have a history degree, the 20th Century is way later than the period I'm mostly interested in, and science was never really a thing that fascinated me all that much. A bit too much of the stories in these first five issues were concerned with really quite unpleasant violence, bordering on horror. I'm all for trying new things, but this is not a comic I will continue buying.
