Comic book review: The Superannuated Man #2- Working it’s magic on a subconscious level.

Writer: Ted McKeever
Artist: Ted McKeever
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 23rd July 2014


I’m not afraid to admit that the ending of this book left me feeling a little confused, and even after re-re-reading that ending a couple of times over I was still just as confused as before. However, something strange has happened to me whilst I’ve been putting this review together. Read on, and I’ll explain what I mean as I go along.

By looking at a small preview for next month’s book I can see that the confusing images of sperm that conclude this issue are going to lead into some kind of dissertation or perhaps even dissection of the theory of evolution. And as a man with an opinion or two on that subject matter, this certainly intrigues me enough to keep me onboard this excellent, if slightly, and perhaps only temporarily, confusing comic book.

The art, for those not yet familiar with Ted McKeever, is uniformly excellent, a bit grotesque and out there for sure, but you get the impression that the man takes great pride in his work, and it really shows in his inks. I love it, and I’m not usually the kind of guy that thinks something is ‘cool’ just because it looks kind of yucky. This is quality yucky. Yucky with style.

There were a couple of talking points that came to mind whilst I was reading this book. These are issues/concerns that resonate with myself on a personal and intellectual level, but that’s what you get here with my reviews.

The first of these issues was the way that meat was treated as meat. In this grotesque future world where animals are operating with the same level of consciousness as human beings they like to eat meat, just like a lot of us do, and some of that meat just so happens to be human meat. This makes a lot of sense to me, and this is coming from a vegan, a bloke who believes that we shouldn’t eat any meat at all.

If animals began acting as we do, why wouldn’t they eat human flesh? Why wouldn’t they have a butcher shop with a human carcass in the back- room? We eat animal flesh right now, and a lot of us think that this is normal behaviour. It’s morally wrong and we all know it deep down, but we hide it from ourselves, preferring to enjoy our pork chops and not even think about where they came from. If animals had evolved consciousness and became just like us, then surely eating human flesh would be quite natural for them, right? It’s wrong, but so is eating the flesh of animals, and that’s why I am a vegan.

The second issue this book got me to thinking about kind of ties into the first one really, in that it’s an issue about valuing conscious life. The Superannuated man is watching a movie, and this big blob floating head creature is ranting about mankind being a plague on Earth, and that procreation is evil. He’s an eugenicist basically, a talking head on the television set, telling us that human beings are bad. You know his type? Bill Gates, David Attenborough, all of those kindly old liberals who tell us that we should kill ourselves to save the planet. That’s how I see them, and that’s what I got from the floating head God creature in this book.

Perhaps I wasn’t as confused as I thought that I was. That’s why I do these reviews you know, to get the most out of these books, and if anybody bothers to read my thoughts, and I’m assuming that most of these reviews will never even be read, then that’s just a bonus. So I liked the book, it made me think about a few things, working on a subconscious level that has slowly been revealed as I’ve haphazardly put this review together. That’s quite clever really, isn’t it?
Rating: 8.5/10