Comic Review and Analysis: Something Man

It's blatant, unapologetic, sincere, and I love it.

Link to the comic, which you can read for free on this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Fresherluke/status/1671495816698011648

Something Man is a comic that was recently shared for free by an artist and writer who goes by “Fresher Luke” on Twitter. He’s a talented artist, and has a collection of other indie comics under his belt, including Bikini Cowboy, Wing-Head, and the currently ongoing Forsaken Gods.

I haven’t read all of his back-catalog, but Something Man is likely the most overtly political comic he’s ever made.

The story is set in what can most simply be described as a woke dystopia. There was a second Civil War and the forces of left wing identitarianism won (pretty believable considering what a collection of disorganized, infighting, headless chickens the forces opposing them are). So now society is ruled by the principles of the oppression stack. Everyone has a literal Oppression Point score which works as a sort of social credit score, and the more “oppressed” you are, the higher a position in society you’re given.

At the same time, people have started developing special abilities, a-la mutants in the X-Men series. To deal with this, the CTGA (the government of the setting) rounds up “enhanced individuals”, preferably as children, and keeps them locked up in a big government building called “The Alcove”. Some of these people are put to work for the CTGA as agents, capturing other enhanced individuals. Their treatment depends on their Oppression Points and how powerful their abilities are. The more powerful they are, the worse they’re treated and the less freedom they have.

The political nature of the setting isn’t subtle. The bureau that captures enhanced individuals is called “The Bureau of Affirmative Action”, and the CTGA uses not only the Progress Flag (the official name of what I called the NuPride flag in a previous essay) but the meme version of the Progress Flag that combines 4 flags in one to form a swastika. A Balenciaga bondage teddy bear even makes a cameo appearance. Fresher Luke isn’t embarrassed or shy about the comic’s message.

Subtle as a statue with a dick and breasts.

It’s refreshing in many ways, after being bombarded with so much overbearing propaganda from the other side, to read something from this direction that pulls no punches.

“But isn’t this just as bad as all those cringe woke propaganda pieces attacking the right?” I can already hear the protest of moderates and more than a few conservatives. Well obviously I’m biased, but I’m still `going to give some important reasons why the answer is “no.”

First of all, I already wrote a whole essay about politics in the arts, but to summarize briefly, if you’re right-leaning or centrist person who has a knee-jerk reaction like this now but doesn’t when you hear a Rage Against the Machine or Dead Kennedys song, you should consider that you’ve been infected with a sort of entertainment slave morality. You’ve been brainwashed into finding overt right wing messages in entertainment inherently cringe while overt left wing messages are only cringe when poorly executed. Break the conditioning. Stop that.

Listen to “ Breaking the Conditioning” by The Alex Jones Prison Planet to get in the mood if need be.

Secondly, let’s compare Something Man’s political messaging to the messaging of a recent Superman comic. Superman thwarts a shooting, then confronts the REAL villain, who is, of course, licensed firearms dealer who is also, of course, an ugly pot-bellied redneck with a Confederate flag, Stormfront shirt (is that even a thing?), and his pants unzipped. Superman terrorizes the deplorable a little and then leaves him to be picked up by the cops.

The primary point of this scene, is of course, that the political enemy is ugly and low-status. Right wingers and left wingers both do this, but in left wing content it’s often the ONLY point or the point given the most emphasis (the latter is the case here, with an absurd amount of things piled on to hammer the point home). Keith Woods and others outlined this tendency years ago.

Left wingers also more often create fictional characters to represent the ugly, low-status nature of their enemies, while right wingers more frequently base their representations of the left on real people. Arguing something is a strawman falls much more flat when it’s a faithful recreation of a real life person’s appearance and behavior.

The second point of the scene, that legal gun dealers are selling guns illegally to children, thus causing mass shootings, is a straight up lie. With all the media stories about mass shootings and school shootings, I guarantee you haven’t heard of a single incident of a gun being illegally sold to the shooter by a licensed firearms dealer or a successful lawsuit related to such a thing happening. There are both moral and pragmatic reasons for this. People who go through the effort and expense of become legal firearm sellers aren’t going to throw it all away for a couple hundred bucks on an illegal sale. But none of this matters to progressive 2nd Amendment haters with a narrative to push.

In short, the scene is a shotgun-blast demonization of several different subsets of “the wrong sort of people” all mashed together.

By contrast, Something Man’s target isn’t people, but ideology. Even the grinning “xir” who gives the MC her orders, who’s the closest thing the comic has to a main villain due to being the face of the government, isn’t presented in an overly-caricatured or dehumanized way. The system is a horrendous dystopian clown show, but the people in it are portrayed as just that. People. Even in the sillier satirical moments they feel like human beings, not the writer’s juvenile “revenge” fantasy aimed at people he’s never met.

The ideology presented in the comic is also a pretty accurate extrapolation of an already fairly dominant social ideology. President Joe Biden has made several Tweets and comments calling children the collective property of the state, trans “activists” and “allies” are currently having Twitter meltdowns over the platform banning “cis” as a slur, because that’s something only their side is allowed to do, and the company of the submarine that just broke down while visiting the Titanic wreckage, causing five tragic deaths, had refused to hire “50 year old white guys” because they aren’t “inspirational.” The CGTA is really just all the dysgenic, kakistocratic, and totalitarian impulses of the radical social left completely unchained. With superpowers.

So that’s the setting and politics. What about the story? That’s where things get interesting.

Something Man’s viewpoint character (at least for the first issue, if more are made, other perspectives may be shown) is Number 43, a black woman and enhanced individual. Her identity is very important, because combined with her relatively weak special abilities, it has resulted in the CTGA giving her a leadership position over a squad that captures enhanced individuals for the government. The thing is… she’s a terrible leader. And she knows it. In her last mission she froze at a pivotal moment and her entire team was killed. This was the third time this has happened. Despite her growing PTSD over these incidents, she never gets reprimanded and keeps getting placed back in command of new teams.

Number 43, with dead teammate.

This works both on a surface level and as a meta-commentary on all the “strong, empowered” girlboss characters who are continually shoehorned into popular franchises currently. Unlike those characters however, Number 43 is actually likable and interesting. Being flawed in a way that no modern mainstream piece of entertainment would dare depict a black woman being gives her an interesting character conflict.

The story is largely a flashback of 43’s latest fateful mission, where an attempt to capture an enhanced individual (a young white boy, a usage of identity that I once again think is a deliberate and meaningful choice) went SNAFU. The boy’s power is the ability to produce explosions, which prove to be strong enough to overpower the team’s efforts to contain him. After the boy blows most of them to kingdom come, a mysterious man in a very sentai-esque costume shows to have a heart-to-heart with the boy, calm him down, and take him away. This is presumably the titular Something Man, although his name is never spoken in this volume.

During their conversation, the boy reveals that CGTA agents killed his parents when they resisted efforts to take him away, which is what led to him going nuclear.

This moment never happens in the comic. Maybe it goes without saying.

Something Man comforts the boy, takes note of 43, and tells the boy she’s, “one of us, she just doesn’t know it yet.” Then he gives her his emblem as he leaves with the boy. That about sums it up. It’s kind of neat how much of a heroic and inspiring figure Something Man is despite doing no fighting and showing no powers (except maybe an ability to resist the boy’s explosion powers). A reminder that heroics are about more than punching, shooting, or stabbing things.

By the way, Something Man’s emblem is what’s known as the “Cool S.” You probably recognize it as that thing school kids have been drawing in their notebooks for generations. Lots of people incorrectly believe it started as a brand logo, but it never was, and while it was popularized in the 1970’s, examples of it have actually been traced all the way back to the 1890’s. The significance of the Cool S hasn’t been made clear within the comic, but considering its long history as something countless children have drawn to entertain themselves without being instructed or coerced to, it could be considered a powerful visual representation of the slogan, “Let kids be kids.”

Number 43 holds Something Man’s Cool S

Or maybe it was chosen just because it looks cool. Whatever the intent, it’s kind of neat that Something Man is represented by one of the world’s most successful pre-internet memes; instantly recognizable and uncopyrightable.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about Something Man. Give it a read if you didn’t before reading this. It’s not too long. I hope that more volumes come out. I also hope many more works like this are made. This is the sort of thing we need.

You can also support Fresher Luke’s other current project, Forsaken Gods, here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bkcb2/forsaken-gods-volume-1?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=forsaken It’s less political but also promising. The man is a talented creator who is going against the grain, and he deserves support for it.

I intend to do more reviews and analyses of works with political themes in mind on the Substack in the future, in addition to my usual content.

Until next time, take care of yourselves out there.