It’s a pretty standard comic book trope. There’s a super-intelligent scientist, like a Dr. Reed Richards or a Dr. Bruce Banner. Some accident, or exposure to some weird new radiation, gives him super powers a-la the Fantastic Four or The Incredible Hulk. Hijinks ensue. “Con-CERN-ed,” a new digital comic book from Dark Horse, puts a new wrinkle on things by trading sci-fi technology for real technology in the form of the Large Hadron Collider, which gives Dr. Simon Barstow his super-powers.
The comic is the creation of Mark Wolfe and one LeVar Burton, who helped teach generations of kids how to read as part of Reading Rainbow and played an engineer on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Geordi LaForge, wasted no time in drawing the connection between Trek and his comic in an interview with Comics Alliance. “One of the aspects that has defined Star Trek as really fine storytelling is that the science in “Star Trek” is always considered to be realistic, but secondary to story. So Mark [Wolfe] suggested, ‘Let’s go that way.’ Having superheroes is great, but I think some of the most powerful storytelling involves ordinary people doing extraordinary things and so with those two objectives in mind, Mark lead us in the direction of the LHC. It was serendipity, really. It was around the time that the LHC was starting up and they were beginning to smash particles and people were nervous and concerned and excited and [the idea] just worked. It worked as a storytelling device and it put our hero in a precarious situation where he had to respond to extraordinary circumstances.”
The eight-page comic book is available now as part of the MySpace Dark Horse Presents series of digital comics. It is their 36th and final edition.
Tags: LHC, CERN, Large Hadron Collider, LeVar Burton, Large Hadron Collider comic book, Simon Barstow, Con-CERN-ed, Dark Horse, digital comics, comic book about Large Hadron Collider, physics comic book, Mark Wolfe, MySpace, Dark Horse Comics Presents
