Just read the first six issues, and it wasn’t really making me fall in love, but it was an interesting premise, and I liked it enough to keep reading to see what was getting built.

But then I got to the snatching and forced impregnation of women from the Sudan, and then that led into the reveal that Sahara, who is engaged to one of Elephantmen, is the daughter of one of those women.

It just feels so…80s in its idea, you know? Not just the rape-as-plot thing that really became a thing in the late 80s and into the 90s, but just the whole fact that they take the time to make a point to say the women from the Sudan won’t be missed or remembered (subtle). And then to have the daughter of one fall for an Elephantman. It all just feels…

It’s skeevy. Especially given that the mad scientist who created the Elephantmen is shown to be PLENTY evil without having to resort to the got-to-rape-someone trope and then adding on the relationship between Sahara and Horn. It’s all made worse by the fact that they showcase each artist/writer at the end of each issue, and a lot of the dudes on the book draw some pretty questionable stuff in the tiny-waist-giant-tits variety. 

It feels like a step back in a lot of ways. Yes, the premise is interesting, but the tics in the writing are tics that I thought the industry was really getting away from. But there they are, like a bad soap opera plot, rolling in again because the people writing didn’t think they could make a man who grows human/animal hybrids in a lab and then treats those fully aware and thinking hybrids as the absolute lowest form of anything properly evil until he was raping and killing women, specifically women he captured from an area of Africa that’s been known for its attacks against women.

It also just doesn’t make sense from a story perspective. Why can’t they just be vat-grown? The story’s 200 years in the future. The evil guy would still be really fucking evil if he’d vat-grown, and you could have, in fact, used that piece of information to really bring it home. How about, rather than raping and killing women, he just drowned any specimen that wasn’t growing the way he wanted?

There was a way to write around a possible rape-and-kill-women scenario, and these guys either couldn’t find it or didn’t want to. Not sure this book gets a second arc chance from me.