Comic Book Review – The Human Target

The Human Target (2023)
Reprints The Human Target #1-12
Written by Tom King
Art by Greg Smallwood

I hate to keep harping on how much I dislike Tom King’s work but here we are again. If I don’t like the guy so much why do I keep coming back, you might be asking. I think it’s because on the surface his concepts aren’t bad. He likes using lesser “played with” toys from the DC Universe and I have always been far more interested in those figures than seeing Batman all the time. In the instance of The Human Target he took this obscure character created to tell spy stories and combined it with the Giffen-DeMatteis-era Justice League. I will admit that’s a creative combination I hadn’t ever thought of. I love those characters and that era for how unique they were, how risky it was to go in that direction. King is currently writing Danger Street, another 12 issue maxi-series bringing in some of the most obscure characters from DC’s 1970s showcase First Issue Special. I will definitely be reading that one when it is done.

The other thing I find that draws me to King’s work is not his writing but his artistic collaborators. I assume someone like King gets his pick of the available artists and they must like working with him because you see the same names come up time and time again. In the case of The Human Target what kept me reading was not the writing, but Greg Smallwood’s 1960s-inspired pencils and design work. Smallwood’s whole catalog is extremely impressive, feeling almost like paintings but done with Madison Avenue-styled draftsmanship. The artist should win every award this book is up for. The story is where we run into an ongoing weak point though.

Christopher Chance is a private investigator who is known for impersonating his clients in order to draw out threats to them, hence the nickname The Human Target. When the book opens, Chance has been hired by Lex Luthor and manages to take out an attacker during a press conference. However, he notices a strange taste in his mouth afterward which increases in intensity and causes him to pass out after becoming painful. DC’s resident super-physician Doctor Midnight tells Chance that he has been poisoned and that our protagonist only has 12 days to find an antidote before he dies. This particular poison is extraterrestrial in origin and that it comes from an area that was visited by an old iteration of the Justice League. All the evidence points to one of them being behind this attempted poisoning.

It’s a great hook for a story and then King drags it on for twelve issues. Like I said, it wasn’t a punishment to see Smallwood’s gorgeous art but I do sort of need a story I’m invested in. Because I’ve read so much of King’s work I’m picking up on a lot of plot devices getting used over and over again. King’s main characters are almost always put in a situation where they “die” but then the end of the mini-series makes the specifics of that confusing. I have no problem whatsoever with ambiguity but The Human Target doesn’t really seem to bring the threads together in a way that’s very satisfying. 

King will do a lot of place setting in the first half of these stories, he knows what makes for an interesting situation, but then the second half is just a dud. He overwrites in order to compensate, I suppose but I find myself getting lost in what exact point he’s trying to make, if any. One of his problems is that he’s so interested in playing with the toys that don’t get much attention but he doesn’t seem to know how to write them all that well.

I have absolutely no issue with his characterization of the Justice League members, it is a Black Label book after all. It’s a fun parallel universe portrayal so they don’t have to match up with “canon”, as if that even exists anymore in the genre. I like that he spends a lot of time developing Ice in a way that she never got under the pen of Keith Giffen or J.M. DeMatteis. We spend a lot of time in Chance’s head and there’s some interesting bits there. 

At the end of the whole 12 issues I just wasn’t all that impressed. And why are so many of King’s projects 12 issues, not all, but so many of them are. This is showing the real limits of decompressed storytelling because we aren’t doing anything that compelling with all this space we have to play in. The world he has set up is really interesting and I’d like to explore more of it but with a different writer, please?