The Manhattan Projects, Volume 1

Science.  Bad.
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Pitarra

Re-imagine some of the world's greatest scientists of the early-20th century as wizard scientists.  Re-imagine the U.S.'s notorious Manhattan Project, responsible for the development of the atomic bomb and headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, as only one of many top-secret, pseudo-scientific research projects under the management of the American government:  pan-dimensional space mining, A.I. super-computers, robotic limbs, molecular reconstitution, and inter-dimensional portals. 

The success of The Manhattan Projects is largely attributable to its fancifully twisted historical revisionism, the persistent juxtaposition of popular real-world figures and their fictional occult counterparts, including Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, Jr., Spock-inspired Enrico Fermi, egotist Richard Feynman, Harry Daghlian, Jr., little more left than a skull in a space suit after his irradiation accident, and Presidents Roosevelt, now a dead supercomputer mainframe, and Truman, a Masonic priest.  But foremost among these:  Oppenheimer himself and Albert Einstein.

"'In the beginning, when I first joined the Projects—before his internal civil war, before the Great Culling, before the Amalgamated Oppenheimer coalesced, thirty-two distinct versions of the doctor existed.

From there, the rate of fracture increased exponentially, and by 1968 that number was virtually endless.'

Clavis Aurea
The Recorded Feynman, Vol. 1"  (The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: 31)

In a stroke of morbid storytelling genius, Hickman transforms Oppenheimer into his own bomb, a slow-acting but catastrophic fission reaction initiated by the collision (via cannibalism) of both Oppenheimer twins, Robert and his genocidal brother Joseph.  His personality fractures, resulting in a chain reaction of competing (and nearly infinite) Oppenheimers.  Einstein is a punchline, literally:  "A Jew, a scientist and a drunk walk into a lab" (101).  Einstein.  But, like Oppenheimer replaced by his evil red twin, the terrible progeny of his scientific imagination, Einstein too is replaced by another stepping through a dimensional portal of his own construction and stranded in the foreign world.

Feynman:  "I can't believe we're doing this...  Should we be doing this?  Are we even allowed to do this?"
Groves:  "Doctor Feynman, do you see anyone stoppin' us?"  (78)

Certainly, The Manhattan Projects is a creative romp, but it's always also a playful if deadly serious deconstruction of the correlation of warfare and political upheaval to scientific advancement.  Science seems to owe an uneasy debt to turmoil.  "The cause" as articulated by Wernher von Braun is an unsettling distillation of scientific prerogative, so unsettling precisely because it is so familiar.  And yet, Hickman's sci-fi setting metaphorically expands the seemingly inescapable trajectory of human history.  The galaxy, quite literally, is at war, a territorial fight for political supremacy and natural and scientific resources.  The scientists of the Manhattan Projects, like their Manhattan Project counterparts, are uniquely equipped to combat the new threat, but the practical and moral consequences of their actions in that task are difficult to justify.

Artist Nick Pitarra and colorist Jordie Bellaire give Hickman's story a puzzling vibrancy.  There's a suitable chaos in Pitarra's lines, a rich combination of Frank Quitely and Nickelodeon's Rugrats, that doesn't always make realistic sense but gives the series expressive depth and humor.  Bellaire's coloring—vivid reds and blues for different worlds and comparably mute palates for Earth—helps significantly in differentiating the series' multiple timelines and worlds, if it presents semi-explained puzzles in some sequences.  Simultaneously dark and whimsical, Pitarra and Bellaire capture just the right tone, a perfect match for the bizzare content.

Collects The Manhattan Projects #1-5: "Infinite Oppenheimers," "Rocket Man," "The Bomb," "The Rose Bridge," and "Horizon"

ISBN:  978-1607066088