Cleansing the Palate: A Look At Heroes Comics

by Benton Sartore

Heroes Comics, Volume 1
DC Comics, 2007

Are you a fan of the television drama “Heroes” who needs more than your weekly fix?  The show already has an easy in with comic book nerds — ordinary people find out they have superpowers — and so it’s a natural that the show would turn to comic books to provide that little extra. Since the show began, even during hiatuses and the Writer’s Guild strike, a new comic is posted on NBC.com every Monday, usually tied into a recent episode; during the longer breaks, the comics tend more to establish original stories with new characters, as they have the time to flesh out a full story.  Volume 1 fills in some of the gaps in Season 1, though some of them were gaps that didn’t need to be filled.

Most of the comics are only 6 pages long, to accommodate an Internet audience, and a lot of the early installments suffer for that by not offering enough of a chance to tell a really fleshed-out story.  The early stories jump from hero to hero, and often function as small asides to the real action.  “Aftermath” finds Claire pulling a boy out of a car crash, for example, and “Control” has Matt using his mind-reading abilities to catch a criminal.  Not exactly deep and satisfying literature, though some fun eye-candy, and a good way to get your Heroes fix if the show isn’t enough for you.  There are some more interesting stories as well — “Isaac’s First Time” is the prophetic painter recollecting the first time he painted the future, with disastrous results, and “Life Before Eden” tells the origin story of Eden, the girl with the persuasive voice — but overall it’s a mixed bag until the second half of the collection, when the stories start to kick into high gear.

The second half focuses almost entirely on Bennet and new character Hana Gitelman, who is seen in a few episodes of the second half of the first season working with Ted Sprague and Matt Parkman to try to bring down the Company.  A four-part story tells how Hana discovered her power of digital communication and how Bennet adeptly manipulated her into joining the Company, deceiving her into believing she was a U.S. government agent.  It’s a pretty cool story that shows off just what the weekly comic book is capable of, something the comic would try again in the Volume 2 collection with the origin stories of both the Haitian and Candice.

Fan favorite Bennet also takes front and center in a lot of the stories in the second half, as he looms large in Hana’s stories and receives a few features of his own, including the pretty good “Hell’s Angel,” telling the story of how Bennet first met his eventual adoptive daughter, Claire.  The collection wraps up with the ambitious six-parter “War Buddies,” in which Bennet sends Hannah to a government facility to track down the origins of the Company.  She finds a classified document detailing a company in Vietnam sent to track down Au Co, a mysterious weapon being used against U.S. troops.  The only two survivors are none other than Arthur Petrelli and Daniel Linderman, the latter strongly resembling the young Malcolm McDowell before he had yet appeared on the show.  It’s one of the strongest stories in the collection for being so willing to go off the beaten path — seemingly having no tie-in to the Heroes universe until the very end — and features the very best of what Heroes comics has to offer: original story, a clever way to tie in existing characters, and being long enough to really explore what goes on in the characters’ heads.

The collections ends on another mixed bag — a two-parter set in the “Five Years Gone” future telling how Future Peter fell in love with Future Niki — and a final resolution for Hana Gitelman’s character, the unsubtly-named “The Death of Hana Gitelman,” which ties in with the end of the first season.  Of both the collections, this is definitely the most focused, as it follows note-for-note with Season 1 a lot of the time, and aside from some slow starting, it’s a pretty good read for Heroes fans.