by Grant Springford
A mystery team of unusual superpowered beings, working for some shadowy government organistaion or other…. that’s The Abnormals. This is the first outing for the team and alongside the usual bit of gathering up the team and introductions we get an underground adventure as a weird super team take on a very weird menace. I do like the strap line that comes from the website:
“There is a dark and twisted universe beneath the ancient city of London. In Subterranea every legend and myth you ever heard is true. Down in the darkness demons dwell and villains gather and plot. Ghosts and monsters roam long-forgotten passageways while visitors from other dimensions tear through rifts in time and space.
Deeper still, warps in reality have formed swamps, forests and vast primordial plains, on which dwell all manner of alien civilisations and curious creatures. It is said there is even a chasm that leads all the way to the centre of the Earth… where, as everyone knows, the dinosaurs live.”
Alien civilisations, demons, ghosts, monsters – that should keep the comic going for quite a while. And dinosaurs – can you ever go wrong with Dinosaurs? (Okay Jurassic Park 3 perhaps, but think comics. Dinosaurs in comics are always cool).
The Abnormals opens a year in the past, with mystery man Jack Patch doing the typical spy thing of meeting agents in the park. Except Jack Patch isn’t your normal sort of government spook, and the woman he’s meeting, the woman he’s offering work to isn’t a usual sort of operative either:
I do like the way Springford sets the issue up with this little scene, before Springford drops us into the superhero adventure that follows and gives me hope that he’ll be mixing things up slightly in the future with a little bit of spy intrigue in between his superhero story.
Because, make no bones about it, The Abnormals is very much a superhero story, one more towards Morrison’s run on The Doom Patrol than Superman or Spider-Man perhaps, but superhero nonetheless. Straight after the spies in the park intro we jump forward a year, to a mysterious and terrifying moment on the London Underground, where one particular worker is never going to forget what happens. And alongside the Morrison-esque weirdness of his heroes, Springford manages to deliver a villain that would have sat perfectly well in the pages of Doom Patrol:
These guys are The Ragged Ghosts – “malevolent psychokinetic life forms wrap themselves in lost property. Having form makes it easier to hunt – and feast upon – their prey. A single Ragged Ghost can strip a being to the bone. Can The Abnormals hold back a horde intent on escaping Subterranea?” A great image, great idea.
Now, in the pages after that, it does, at least for me, go off the boil a little, but only a little. Maybe that was simply down to having to shoehorn introductions into the story, but something was lacking in the pages that followed.
However, Springford’s team is interesting, even though they’re mere ciphers at the moment – in addition to the woman recruited at the start, there’s the alien looking teleporter, a magician-y looking one with a link between Earth and the Astral plane, a Troglodyte with energy powers, and a funny little Imp all the way from hell. Like I say, right now there’s nothing to them aside from the powers, as there’s very little space to establish huge amounts of characterisation here…. but there’s still something about The Abnormals that impressed, a feeling that there’s a good deal of potential in the setup, in the characters and most of all in Springford himself.
The art, reminiscent of Martin Eden’s in Spandex a little, is good, not exactly my sort of thing, but fun, interesting stuff – however for a comic that takes place almost totally in the Underground (and below) it’s a little too eye-poppingly bright, and the bright colours and absense of shadows does strip some of the menace and threat from the story. I’m not going to say what the (very, very) big menace towards the end was, but something that big, that far underground, shouldn’t really look more like a big cuddly toy than the terrifying creature Springford wanted it to be. A little bit of darkness would go a long way here.
So although The Abnormals didn’t really set my world on fire, it certainly had me reading till the end. It’s not perfect, not by any means but it does what it does very well, an effective, fun, promising superhero series to keep a look out for. There’s something there, something intriguing in the characters and the setup that leaves me wondering where he’s going to take The Abnormals next.
You can buy The Abnormals Special here. And find out more at Grant Springford’s website.
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