Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Christopher Chance is the Human Target: an incredibly skilled mimic who can vocally and physically impersonate anyone. He uses this skill to become a body double for people whose lives are in danger and while pretending to be you he will also intercept and disable the person trying to kill you. Created in 1972 by Len Wein and Carmine Infantino, this high-concept premise for detective stories and crime fiction has featured in numerous stories and book collections, and has been the basis for two television series.
This murder mystery starts with a literal killer hook as when hired by Lex Luthor, supervillain and billionaire super business mogul, to thwart an assassination attempt, Christopher Chance unwittingly drinks a deadly radioactive poison in Luthor’s coffee. There is no cure. Chance is a dead man walking, with maybe twelve days left before he dies. He decides to use that time to find out who poisoned him. There are only twelve people in the world with access to the radioactive material which comes from another dimension – but they are all superhumans. And not just any people with powers, but the twelve members of the Justice League International! With their histories any one of them has a good reason to want Lex Luthor dead. But which of them would actually do it?
Tom King’s riff on the 1949 classic Film Noir whodunnit D.O.A. delivers an ingenious puzzle that shuffles the pieces back and forth between scenes of past and present. Chance’s backstory is interwoven with the stories of the people he questions in his attempt to find out who is responsible for his impending death, and Greg Smallwood’s beautifully retro-flavoured design and illustration techniques deliver stylish and intricate compositions that are strong on character and interpersonal relationships. Every chapter examines a different member of the JLI, designed with a unique twist illuminating their particular power and personality. The inventive ways their quirks and styles are explored are brilliantly playful and intriguing. And like the best Noir films, the mixture of greed, pride, human fallibility, doomed romance and surreal plot devices adds up to well-realised misdirection as the mystery only deepens the longer the story goes on. But with each day Chance gets weaker and less capable as his body begins to fail. Is he going to die before he uncovers the identity of his killer?
The Human Target Deluxe Edition is a substantial 456-page hardcover volume, presenting the story that was collected as two smaller books into one big book featuring a new cover by Smallwood, an introduction by King, a making-of section including the script for the first chapter, a breakdown by Smallwood of his art process, all the variant covers plus sketches for those covers by ten of the artists. It also includes the Tales of The Human Target one-shot that accompanied the original twelve issues. This series won two Eisner Awards in 2023 for Best Limited Series and for Greg Smallwood as Best Penciller/Inker. If you enjoy mysteries, the kind of character-based, sitcom storytelling that was a hallmark of 90’s DC superhero comics, and crime comics such as those Parker books by Darwyn Cooke, you’ll like this.
