Genesis Of A Saga

John Byrne's 2112
Dark Horse Comics
John Byrne, writer and artist
***mature content warning***

I completely missed the references the first time through.

The previous two posts to this blog have been about John Byrne's Next Men. I don't always read the letters pages when I go back and read an old comic I've recently purchased. I typically scan the letters for familiar names or things that might catch my eye, but seldom do I read them all. Such was the case when I read my first dozen-and-a-half issues of JBNM for the very first time. But in this most recent reading of the books, I stumbled across several mentions of another Byrne/Dark Horse book, a one-shot, titled John Byrne's 2112. I gathered from those letters that this was a book published before JBNM and that the big bad from that title, Sathanas, had first appeared in 2112.

I decided to make my reading experience of JBNM complete by trying to include this book, too, if possible. But to be honest, I expected the link between 2112 and JBNM to be very slight. My expectation was that 2112 was written as a self-contained, standalone, done-in-one story, possibly having been written a few years before JBNM. Then later, while crafting the story that would become JBNM, Byrne had decided to reuse an old character from a previous story.

I was successful in my attempt to find a reasonably priced copy of John Byrne's 2112, and it arrived in time for me to read it immediately after I finished Next Men: Aftermath. I wish I had known about the book earlier and had ordered it and read it BEFORE reading JBNM because it truly is a prequel to the JBNM saga.

The book was published in November 1991, just two months prior to the publication of JBNM No. 1, likely just allowing enough time for the four Dark Horse Comics Presents vignettes later collected into JBNM No. 0. Sathanas is the evil mastermind behind a mutate uprising in the year 2112. Think of mutates as similar to mutants. And the events of the 2112 one-shot lead directly into Sathanas' appearance in the pages of JBNM. But the connections do not stop there.

The point of view character in 2112 is a young law enforcement cadet named Thomas Kirkland who also plays a key role in the JBNM series. Kirkland learns in 2112 that his superiors have kept secret the origins of the mutates from the general populace -- that they stemmed from a government genetics project gone wrong in the 20th century, a project codenamed Next Men. There are other names and characters in 2112 which reappear in JBNM, so there can be no question that Byrne fully intended this book to lead into the Next Men saga. For completists, this book is indispensable when trying to read JBNM, and well worth a look.