Sidetrack From The Saga

Whipping Boy
Dell/Abyss
John Byrne, writer
***mature content warning***

There is still one final tangent to explore along my journey through both volumes of John Byrne's Next Men and their prequel comic, John Byrne's 2112.

As discussed last time, I don't always read all of the fan mail or cross-reference notes in an older comic I'm reading for the first time. Sometimes I do, but other times I just breeze right past them. When I discovered that the link between JBNM and 2112 was much stronger than I at first realized, I decided to go back and check out another editor's note from JBNM Volume 1 a little closer.


In JBNM No. 16, the final issue in the "Fame" story arc, Dollar Comics executive Ben Horowitz has introduced the Next Men to the world as real-life superheroes. A Chicago-based newspaper reporter and her editor, simply named Donna and Walker, respectively, take note of the story and are curious about it. The pair have a brief conversation about the Next Men and wonder about their link to someone named Paul Trayne and some events from five years in the past in a place called Faulkner, Ill. Donna and Walker show up again briefly in a later issue of Volume 1 while the Next Men are being hunted by the authorities but not at all in JBNM Volume 2, so their contributions to the overall narrative are slight. But that first conversation between them that references Paul Trayne and Faulkner, Ill., includes an editor's note: "For complete details, pick up a copy of 'Whipping Boy,' available from Dell/Abyss."

So off I went in search of this title to see how it tied in with the rest of JBNM.

I searched several back issue sites online, as well as eBay, but could not find a single comic going by this name. I wasn't familiar with an Abyss comic publisher, but Dell published a number of comics several decades ago. Still, I was coming up empty everywhere I searched. By chance one day, I decided to try a search on Amazon.com. Amazon is not a great site for finding single-issue comics, but maybe, just maybe, I thought, there might be a trade of Whipping Boy available. I did find the book on Amazon, also learning why I'd had so much trouble locating it before. Whipping Boy is NOT a comic, but a prose novel written by Byrne and published in 1992, the same time 2112 and JBNM got started.

In hindsight, this novel really doesn't tie into JBNM much at all. I think Byrne merely chose to include Donna and Walker, two of the characters from his novel, in JBNM as a way to cross-promote the paperback. But if you happen to be curious, it isn't a bad read, although a tad long at 498 pages. (I personally think the narrative could have been edited down from that length somewhat as the action seems to bog down a bit in places, but I was interested enough to finish the entire thing.)

The title Whipping Boy refers to Paul Trayne, a 15-year-old mutant with the ability to look into people's souls and remove their guilt and shame, taking those things into himself. On the surface, this might seem like a wonderful thing, even a gift, as many in the novel first describe it. But keep in mind that as much as JBNM is a science fiction story, Whipping Boy is a horror story with an emphasis on religion and morality. Paul, guided by his father, the Rev. Robert Trayne, reaches out to the residents of Faulkner, Ill., offering his gift. The phenomenon comes to the attention of Chicago newspaper editor Walker Stone, who decides to send one of his reporters, Donna Wojciechowski, to see if Trayne is real or a charlatan. Donna finds more than she bargained for when she arrives, first finding many of the residents of Faulkner greatly changed by the power of Paul Trayne, and later feeling the effects of his "gift" firsthand. And Faulkner is just the beginning of the plans Paul and his father have for bringing this "gift" to the world.