The Interman [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Mr. Parker has assembled one of the most engaging and exciting espionage thrillers that I've read in some time. With clean, tight visuals and sharp writing, the Interman is the book that most genre fans have been waiting for whether they know it or not. Memorable and unforgettable, the Interman has arrived. You won't be disappointed.

Absolutely one of the best graphic novels of the past 5 years. Mr. Parker has crafted a unique story centering on character rather than flash. But not without plenty of excitement, mystery, and action. It's Jonny Quest meets James Bond with a nod to the pulps. A must have.

Comics vet Parker makes his personal indie debut with this mediocre adventure. The hero is the offspring of a top-secret Western attempt in the 1960s to create a super-soldier to fight the Soviets during the Cold War. When the Pentagon shut down the program in the Vietnam era due to worries about public opinion should word leak out (since the PR implications of genetic fiddling would have been pretty bad no matter what else was going on, this doesn't seem like a particularly plausible reason to shut down such a project), they never bothered to keep track of the one "interman" produced (an even more unlikely scenario!). Now, the awkwardly named Van Meach roams the world as a kind of adventuring problem-solver. He's good at this because he's the ultimate adapter: throw him in water and he grows gills and cartilage shifts to help swimming, put him in hot sun or driving snow and his internal temperature doesn't change, plus he's got a heightened danger sense. On the other hand, he's handicapped by a somewhat amusing naivetÈ.

Anyway... the CIA unearths the Interman project archives and for some reason totally panics. Worried that this ultra-adapter is operating as some kind of ultra-dangerous rouge agent, they scramble top hitmen from across the world to kill him. You would think they'd try and find out if he actually WAS an ultra-dangerous rouge agent first, but since the plot demands that they don't, the hitmen are scrambled. Oddly enough, our hero seems to have no clue as to why random people are trying to kill him. Hmmm... maybe it's because a you're a MUTANT?!?! Finally, it occurs to him to check out his origins (wouldn't he have done this a long time ago?) in order to figure out who's behind the hitmen.

The book then turns into a globe-trotting quest for who he is, with intermittent hitman dodging. Despite the total derivativeness of this framework, the hitmen characters are actually pretty interesting. There's a old-fashioned romantic with a sassy mustache, a female martial artist with an interesting personal code, a nifty gang of four, and an enigmatic German who keeps showing up and not killing the hero! And finally, emerging from the mists is Van's secret sister! Who is... wait for it....evil! Because... wait for it... the KGB raised her! Anyway, virtually none of this is particularly original material, and it leads to a predictable ending.

Artistically, the best thing is the cover. The style is pretty clunky and there's not nearly enough detail to bring the characters to life in the way they deserve. The book is word-heavy, which tends to create very cluttered panels. And it doesn't help the lettering is extremely murkyóthis is one of hardest to read graphic novels I've come across. The concept of the adaptive hero is interesting, but if Parker is continue this series, let's hope he can at least come up with a more original storyline and some cleaner lettering.