Hench starts off with our lead character pointing a gun at the head of a tied-up vigilante, and it just gets more interesting from there. What's really interesting about this book is that it isn't just the fourth-wall breaking comedy you'd expect from the concept (although there are plenty of laughs), but is is a genuinely loving tribute to the superhero genre and a very human story of a well-developed character to boot. Beechen explores the notion of being a supervillain's henchmen through a lens that is more real world than parody, although that lens does bring an aspect of humor to it as well, and the resulting read is engaging and touching as well as being funny. Manny Bello, the artist, does kind of a minimalist take on the artwork, which is occasionally distracting but generally kind of fitting, keeping the focus on the foreground and the main character, which fits in thematically with the deliberate tunnel-vision that the protagonist develops for himself.
Anyone who has read comics in the superhero genre is familiar with the henchman, who is generally a bit of throwaway muscle that slows down the hero before the big fight. If they have any character at all, it tends to be that of an ex-con with no brains at all. Beechen instead shows us a henchman whose biggest failing is a self-admitted desire not to think, a jock who lost his big chance to be a pro and fell into a job that is, upon reflection, pretty well-suited to his skills. Beechen presents our lead, Mike Fulton, as basically an average guy who missed out on his chance to be more than average and couldn't quite be satisfied with his average life. Hench is as much a cautionary tale about learning when to be happy as it is a goof on the superhero genre.
Which isn't to say that the book isn't hilariously funny, because it is. Beechen and Bello show the various high and low points of Fulton's career through splash pages that emulate famous moments in superhero history, with a simple "this is me" tag that points out Fulton's unhappy lot in life in a fun, self-deprecating fashion. In addition, while I've grown somewhat tired of the in-jokey nature of superhero pastiche, Beechen and Bello do a pretty good job of introducing some originality into the mix as well, and I loved some of the heroes and villains they created as backdrop for Fulton's tale. The role of the villains and heroes here isn't as stand-ins for Superman and Batman and Joker, but instead as standard archetypal villain and hero cliches that help to shape the life of a henchman, and their background roles makes the tired archetype nods and winks actually useful rather than just a big in-joke that we all get by now.
Manny Bello's art gives me pause, because I find it hard to categorize it. There are elements of the work that I'd honestly write off as amateurish, including pages that look like they never quite got beyond the rough sketch stage, and yet the storytelling is solid and the design sense is excellent, and the whole book does look pretty good. I think that an inker to flesh out the backgrounds and heighten the detail would have served the creators well, but the art in Hench definitely gets the job done, and I have to give Bello a lot of credit for his design of the superheroes and villains, not to mention the homage panels which perfectly capture the original with just the right humorous touch.
Hench has earned praise from Entertainment Weekly and Variety already, and it looks like it might be a breakout book for the publisher and these creators. It deserves to be, because it takes what could have been kind of a goofy lightweight premise and turns in a book that is not only funny but touching and very human. Reading the book isn't likely to make anyone think henchmen are the real heroes or anything, but we might all feel a little bit bad for them the next time they get sucker-punched by Batman and Robin from now on.
